Here is the Otter Rock Sweater in process;

It may look a bit, um, odd because I took photos before the Oops.  Well, actually before I said Oops – the Oops had happened.  You can see the colors and the lace hem, though, so you get an idea of what it is going to look like.

The Oops was due to a simple math error – not an arithmetic error, but a failure to set up the equation for the stitch count correctly (one of the main things I remember from high school math is that you have to set up the problem correctly in order to get the right answer – this is golden information that all knitters and probably most other people should live by!). 

I did proper gauge swatching in both the lace pattern and stockinette – coming up with 3½ stitches per inch for the latter and “3 1/2 pattern repeats” at 2 stitches per pattern repeat for 2 inches (which I even entered into my notes as “7 sts/2 inches”) for the former.  Since I know that lace often works up to a different gauge than stockinette – and since I was using US 9 needles for the lace and US 10s for the stockinette – I anticipated having to change stitch count when I switched patterns.

You would have thought that I would have noticed that 3 ½ sts per inch is darned close to 7 sts per 2 inches.  Yeah.  Minor Oops.  The point is that I had a “change the stitch number when changing patterns” mindset.  So, I was all set for the Real Oops.

I worked out my cast on stitch count for the front of the sweater (with a little rounding): 80 sts.  Knit, knit, knit the lace.  Lovely.  Then, I worked out the stitch count for the stockinette part for the entire circumference of the sweater and came up (with a little rounding) with 159 sts.  Well, lace is a lot more expansive than stockinette, I reasoned.  And figured I needed to add 78 sts (wanted to keep an even number).  Gee, that would mean adding a stitch after every stitch.  Hey, how about doing simple yarn overs – a nice transition from the lace!  Brilliant!  And so I did.  And I happily put in my garter ridge on my 158 stitches and I admired my pretty “yarn over” transition.  And I knit about 6 more rows so I could take some photos and post them on my blog.  Happy, happy.

Until I decided to check the gauge on the stockinette – and it seemed more like nearly 4 sts per inch.  Argh!   I checked it several places.  Yep, somewhere about 3 ¾ sts per inch.  So, I held the sweater up to myself to see if it seemed too small.  Well, no, not really.  In fact, it seemed generous.  Hmmm.  By then it was late at night, so I decided to ask Sarah to take a look at it the next day.

Her first remark was:  Mom, your sweater is enormous!  It is all rippley!

I explained that I had had to double the number of stitches when I changed from lace to stockinette.  And we both measured the gauge again and again and concurred that 3 ¾ was more accurate than 3 ½.  The mystery was that the sweater which should have been  smallish was, in fact, biggish.

It was at this point that the Oops revealed itself.  Perhaps you caught it back in that big paragraph about stitch count?  Where I said I “worked out the stitch count for the stockinette part of the entire circumference of the sweater”?  And then applied that number (159 rounded to 158) to the front?  And since the gauges for the lace and the stockinette were identical and there was no need to add any stitches at all what I had done was double the size of the sweater front!  No wonder it was enormous and rippley!!

Nothing to do but rip it back to the lace and begin the blue portion all over – though I did adjust for the more accurate gauge (which I trusted as it had been worked on a 158 stitch gauge swatch over 8 or nine rows!).  So, I added 6 stitches (knitting front & back – no yarn overs this time) and knit the garter ridge and proceeded on to the stockinette.

And, hey, the rows go by so quickly now!