I tried laying out that multi-color roving but the buzzards quickly started picking at it like it was cotton candy.

Here’s a picture of them attacking my Kauni yarn.

Wool is like catnip to them. When I’m knitting Mittens (on the left) is vigilant in monitoring the situation, looking for any opportunity to swipe any unattended yarn balls. Sophie (on the right) is not so bad with yarn but is easily influenced by her sister’s bad behavior.

This week more Kauni arrived so I’ll start on Ruth’s cardigan as soon as I finish the last few details on Roscalie.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been talking about matching up the shoulder seams without any photos to illustrate the problem. The following picture should help clarify things. It shows where I placed the shoulder seam (new) and where the pattern indicates they should be (old).

Before I’ll officially call it finished I need to weave in the ends, dress it on the woolly board and take a picture of me wearing it.

Although no one would notice, there’s one more correction adjustment that I made to the pattern.

Notice the bands around the arm, neck and lower body that appear to mimic the blue/yellow 5 row peerie border in the body of the sweater? This peerie pattern is translated into garter stitch by repeating each color sequence twice; first with a knit round and then with a purl round. This means that the total number of rounds for each garter stitch border would be 10 rounds, right? But that’s not what the pattern says. One of the solid blue rows has only one knit round making a total of 9 rounds. I have no idea why. To me it doesn’t make sense.

What’s wrong with that you might ask? Look at the band around the neck. The pattern says to pick up stitches around the neck and on the next round start the pattern with yellow and blue. I did it and it looked odd not to have a buffer of solid color between the neck edge and the border pattern. So rectify the problem, I added a round of solid blue purl stitches before finishing the remaining 8 rounds.  It’s a small detail but heck, if I’m spending all this time to knit my own vest, I want it done right.

Of course when I start having doubts about the written pattern I tend to look more closely at the picture on the pattern card. On this one I noticed a few things.

1. The picture has been touched up with an artistic brush stroke which kind of blurs the photo.
2. The borders around the arms have an additional round of blue purl stitches while the neck doesn’t.
3. The first XOX pattern (from the shoulder) is slightly different than what’s on the chart in the pattern.

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’ve spent way to much time picking apart this vest.