Ok, remember how I didn't do a swatch? Well, my hubris angered the knitting gods so greatly that they turned the back of my sweater into a Giant Swatch.

I'm knitting and knitting, all happy and shit, when I take a break and hold the work up in front of me. "Look at that!" I marveled, "Such a nice, dense fabric. This is going to look great! My stitches are even, why, this looks like it was made on a machine!" I'm telling you, combined aka Eastern knitting is the way to go.

I mean, it looked Scrumtralescent (I'm so modest.) (Not.)

My next thought, "But it looks a little small. Maybe I'll go ahead and check the gauge."

6 and a half stitches per inch. I need five. This is on larger needles than specified by the pattern. I told you I knit tight. But I was alright! Only mildly disappointed!

I said to myself, "Ok, no problem. I will go higher. In fact, fuck you knitting, I'm going to go up three sizes from the original. Hah!"

So I go up to size 8 needles. I knit a small swatch and remeasure my gauge.

Five and a half stitches per inch. And I can't even fudge it to five. There is no lying to myself about this. That extra half stitch is sitting there, mocking me.

So I cast on and started knitting anyway. The fabric I'm creating looks like a net. I look like I'm going to cry. The whole shebang, in fact, looks like it's going to be thrown away.

But, like, I'll do a whole bunch of knitting on it first before we get to that point. Going alllllll the way, remember? I shake my yarn at you, knitting gods! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

But first, I'm going to take a break and knit something else.

I have seven inches on the sash thing now. Y'all, this thing is killing me. Knit one, purl one. Knit one, purl one. Knit one, purl one. ARRRRRGH. 

I originally thought I could get away with knitting 8 inches for a "normal" sweater (fuck that cropped bullshit), however in a moment of clarity I decided it would be good to, you know, take my actual measurements, and would you believe that in order for this thing to cover my buddha belly the sash is going to have to be NINE inches? Sigh. Damn you, long torso!

It's not even good knitting, either. I've been trying to knit so fast that there are all these little gaps between the double seed stitches. For once I am knitting too loose. Whyyyyyyyy? Oh well, it's cotton. If it's too big I can, like, throw it in the dryer for a while, right? (Somebody please tell me)

So you know that Kyoto sweater I was going to make? Well, after doing a swatch (like a grown up!) I saw that my stitches were too tight. So I went up a needle size and did another swatch. Still too tight, however I wasn't going to go up yet again and deal with a "breezy" sweater. So what did I do? I did The Maths.

I needed five stitches per inch, I was getting six. So I multiplied and divided and made notes and did Maths.

Did I tell you this was the one class I got consistent Ds and Fs in? No?

I did the back of the sweater. I did the two parts of the front. By the second front part I was feeling nervous. I reknit them, as they seemed short. I told myself that blocking would make the stretched out looking rows spring into shape and they would Be Okay. 

Then I started the sleeve. "Whoo hoo!" I thought, "Like, so halfway there!"

Not to be. After going through almost one whole skein of yarn and only having about 8 inches of sleeve to show for it, I thought to myself, "No way this is going to work, I'm going to run out of yarn. And this sleeve seems kind of big."

Big? BIG?! Motherfucker is 20" across. I mean, I know the sleeves are big in the pattern, but dude. It was no longer a sleeve. It was a pant leg.

Turns out the correct size should have been 17" across. May not seem like a huge difference, but tell that to my rapidly diminishing yarn supply.

So I ripped. And ripped. And ripped. I ripped that whole damn sweater. And it felt good.

Today I will re-print the pattern. Like I should have done the first time, I am going to highlight the instructions that pertain to the size I'm going to make. I am going to follow the directions stitch by stitch, row by row. None of this fancy Maths stuff this time. And I'm even going to make the pieces in the right order.

This sweater will live again!