I was motoring along on my Audrey in Unst quite happily and was on my first row of the waist shaping when I noticed that I was twenty stitches short. How does that happen? I counted my live stitches twice. Still short. I counted along the cast on edge. The stitches just weren’t there. I’m not sure what went wrong. When I cast on, I thought it was weird that I had so much of my tail (I used a long tail cast on) left over, but I counted my stitches more than once and it seemed right to me so I went ahead with things. My only guess is that I got the wrong stitch count stuck in my head and thought that I was supposed to have 20 less stitches. I just wish that I had noticed before I was 6 inches into the sweater. Gah.
Before I frogged everything, I frantically tried to figure out if I could just make the sweater with what I had and eliminate some of the back decreases. The pattern has like 2 inches of positive ease through the hips on me. I thought I might be able to fudge things. I tried calculating everything out and my screw up would have given me 2 inches of negative ease through the hips where the ribbing was. Unfortunately, since I decided to add length to the cardigan in stockinette as well as shorten the ribbing, my stockinette gauge would have caused me to have 5.5 inches of negative ease also through my hips. That just wasn’t going to work. I’m was already suspicious of this sweater turning out too small because my swatch grew when I washed it and I used that gauge so the gauge of my unwashed sweater in progress is even smaller. I was a bit nervous about the size before I knew that I was 20 stitches short. I frogged everything and cast on again. I have five rows knit and feel kind of silly for making that mistake.
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