Knitting Blog Chic Knits

YES! There is CUPPAGE!

WARNING: an unseemly, really snitty RANT follows…

BUT, this delightful looking cardi is a sincerely dangerous piece of work!

The Reason: the Pattern

It is from the delightful designers @Rebecca. Never have I found a company with more titillating and innovative designs. I delight in their offerings. I want to make and wear most of them.

I am tortured by their translations. I am mentally squeezed by the brevity of the length of the patterns.

How can you take a complicated, extremely shaped, lacy creation and distill the instructions down to about four paragraphs? I know, I know, the fabulous European knitters don’t NEED any hand holding, BUT WHAT THE ****!

IMHO, it seems, and I have every issue for several seasons, that these tomes are put through an industrial strength meat-grinder universal translator with the results never being read or used by an English speaking person! Now I’m not asking they be read and used by an idiomatic urban inner city speaker/reader like myself…

HERE’s the ChicKnits Boatneck Shell Pattern shizzolated…

I’m just wondering who the H is supposed to be able to understand these translations?

Now as a writer whose A** has been flamed hither and yon on some of these same issues, I have to say kindly: WHAT THE ****!

I spent most of the evenings of my PRECIOUS WEEKEND knitting the Front of my cardi OVER AND OVER. I was doing 4 things at the same time:
working a lace pattern
decreasing for an armhole
shaping a bodice
decreasing for a neckline

Now, I’ve routinely done these things on other garments with NO PROBLEM! But on this one, the directions were so convoluted it put me on the ropes over and over. I’d get one set of instructions right then blow the next.

RIPPIT.

Get the neckline squared away and miss the beginning of the armhole decreases. Score on the AHD and totally screw up the lace pattern.

OH > the lace pattern > given in a two by one inch square graph > left to your imagination > for a wide variety of use > on the body of the sweater > on the neck > on the sleeves. That’s like trusting me with a box of rocks…

Now, I know that patterns need to be brief to keep production costs down. I know some designers take huge personal pride in condensing their instructions as much as humanly possible (and why this is such a point of pride is beyond me).

But please, people, we knitters are paying through the nose for the book to begin with, it comes with NO pattern support, and we really, really WANT to make your stuff because it’s so brilliant! Why make it SO HARD for us to do?

BTW: it still hasn’t apologized…