I reached a milestone in my work on Sunday and decided to take a few days off. I even wrote a wishlist of things I wanted to do, like drive down to the Mornington Peninsula and roam around antique shops.

So, of course, I woke up in the early hours of Monday morning with vertigo and gastro.

No knitting got done over the next day, but I listened to a lot of podcasts. Hooray for podcasts!

Last night I finally managed to pick up the Ribbed Wrap Jacket again. I’m beginning to think I might rename this the WTF? Jacket. First there was the dropped stitch I found in the armhole. Then there was the issue of the armhole being twice as large as it needed to be.

It’s all my fault, though, because I’m altering the way the jacket is knit out of a mad aversion for seaming. The pattern specifies to start at the back, knit up to the shoulders, then continue on down both sides of the front. That eliminates shoulder seams but leaves you with side seams. I’ve knit the fronts and backs in one piece. This means stopping at the armholes and knitting the back and fronts separately. To calculate where to start the separation, I subtracted the width of the arms from the length of the body from hem to shoulders.

Which was wrong. I should have subtracted half of the width of the arms from the length of the body, because the arms are a tube, not some flappy flag things.

When I realised what I’d done, I’d already finished the back and fronts and joined them with a three-needle bind-off. (After reading the notes of other knitters in Ravelry who’ve made this jacket, I decided to do a bind-off rather than grafting to give the shoulder a bit of support.) I didn’t really want to frog back to the armholes, so I sullenly got out a needle and sewed up the seam on the left side. (You can see this in the pic above. I’ve even picked up stitches for the left arm.)

But no matter what approach I took, I couldn’t get it to look right. Without that extra stitch on either side to assist in seaming, the join became one thick rib among regular two-stitch ones. And when I tried it on… when the ribbing was stretched around the body the difference was really obvious.

You know what this means:

Yep. Frogged back to the armholes. Last night I reached the correct place to separate for the fronts and back. At least, this time around, there’ll be only half the amount of knitting on them there was last time.

And to tell the truth, I’m really not up to much more than soothing ribbing at the moment.