I’ve been knitting merrily along on the top-down seamless raglan baby sweater, and I just finished my 76th row, split for the arm holes, joined the body, and knit another four rows down.

I started wondering, though… why doesn’t my sweater look like the example? I scoured the pattern for where my math went wrong, and I counted the purl ridges to see it had about half as many rows before the arm split as mine did. Still I really couldn’t figure out where I went wrong.

I reread the pattern over several more times, checking my stitch counts, the number of stitches increased per section, and everything.

Finally, I figured it out. This is what I was doing:

• Knit row with increases – 8 stitches increased
• Purl
• Knit straight across
• Purl

This is what I should have been doing:

• Knit row with increases – 8 stitches increased
• Purl
• Knit, increasing again – 8 more stitches increased
• Purl

Which means I knit twice as much as I was supposed to, got a weird misshapen shoulder (err, baby capelet?), and will now have to rip it all back.

Sigh. Third time’s a charm, right?

I can’t believe I did something so dumb.

The good news is the father saw the sweater in progress today and said it was beautiful. He was really amazed by the evenness of the stitches and the softness of the fabric. I also learned that his wife just started knitting – another new knitter in the community!

(Let’s hope for her sanity that she doesn’t make mistakes like these.)