Progressing and Ranting

I have too many UFOs. Some are buried in the bottom of closets in unmarked bags, and I just deny that they're there...so before I get into my upcoming Maple Leaf and Tempting II KALs, I managed to finish these fingerless mitts from One Skein...


...and I made some more progress on the Victorian Baby Jacket.

The Jacket was going smoothly until I hit a few frogs. When I was working on the back of the jacket, the pattern told me to decrease 11 stitches evenly on the first ribbing row. So I did, and so it ended up looking like crap because it messed with the Lace Pattern. I ripped the ribbiting ribbing out and spaced my decreases to be above the "bottom" points of the zigzag pattern. No more weird puckering in random places for me, thank you. I wasn't going to trust that the blocking fairy would fix this later.

Happy with the result, I started on the right front, and had the most fiendish time with the decreases along the neck shaping. The pattern called for decreasing at the neck edge every row. They said to do this by K2 tog on the RS (which slants the wrong way). What about the WS? What about when I get to working on the Left Front of the Jacket? I don't think so.

I finally figured out the decreases that looked the same on both the RS and WS, and also slanted the way I wanted: S1, K1, PSSO for the RS, and P1, S1, PSSO on the WS. Also, on both sides I slipped the S's as if to knit to make the stitches lie correctly. I'll have to decrease differently to adjust for the Left Side.

I know, I'm lazy and easily annoyed. I shouldn't expect to have patterns that tell me everything so I don't have to work my brain. I should enjoy these headaches (I say, trying to suppress a snarl) because they'll help prepare me for future projects, right? So I'll turn into a hair-pulling frothing growling maniac once in a while, and I'll entertain myself with the thought that some patterns writers of the world are either 1) trying to mess with me and waste my time or 2) assume I know better than to blindly follow all suggestions. At any rate, it just means I'll appreciate even more the patterns writers of the world who are kind enough to specify what decreases/increases you need to achieve the right look, so you don't have to bother desperately rooting through your knitting reference books after midnight, which, as I've now discovered, turns me into the monstrous Legendary Knitting Werewolf.

AROOOOOOOOooooooooooOOOOOO!