I met with one of my knitting students today because she was having an issue with the shawl collar on a sweater. When I saw the knitting, I immediately saw the issue: the shawl collar looked as if it had slid down the right front of the sweater! She had done a beautiful job with the increases and shaping – it was just that it was growing off one side of the neck opening!
We laughed, of course. And then I frogged it for her and got it back to the row after the pick-up-and-knits (before the shaping). I counted out the stitches (yes, it was the right number) and had her sit beside me while we “marked” it (i.e. counted out the knitting along the stitches without actually working them) and it became clear that this was very odd shawl collar shaping! I studied the pattern and puzzled til my puzzler was sore. And then I compared the numbers for the other sizes with those of the size she was working. It looked something like this:
Row 1: Knit 92(106, 120, 134) sts, turn
Row 2: Slip 1 st, knit 19(16, 23, 30) sts, turn
Row 3: Slip 1 st, knit 13(20, 27, 34) sts, turn
Row 4: Slip 1 st, knit 17(24, 31, 37) sts, turn
Continue increasing 4 sts each row before turn 14 times
(Something like that)
Okay, for fun you can study it and see what is wrong with this pattern.
Hmmmmmm?
Ready?
Notice that the numbers for each size increase by 4 each row --- except for the smallest size which begins with 19 and goes to 13!! Misprint! It should be 9 not 19!
Mystery solved! The extra 10 stitches at the beginning slid the whole collar to the right from the get-go! (unfortunately, my knitter was making the smallest size, of course)
Curiouser and curiouser, though, another knitter (at whose home we were meeting) happened to own the same pattern book. She fetched it and found that in her copy, the 19 was a 9 as it should have been! The books looked identical – both hardback copies with identical pictures, pages, etc. Except for the critical 19-that-should-be-9. Kind of creepy! They were obviously (though not so obviously!) different editions.
Moreover, knitters beware -- typos happen!
