KNITTING WITHOUT DOG HAIR IS NOT AN OPTION

... if you are like me, and you're knitting the Lily Chin Lace Dress from the latest Vogue Knitting. If not, keep on galloping. ;-)

The pattern has a huge freakin' mistake. Yup - I kid you not. I realized something was off when I started the project this week. It's knitted in the round, back and front together all the way from the bottom to the armholes (on a freakin' dress!!!). Of course - before I realized something was wrong - I cast on, started knitting, and completed the first three pattern repeats. After that, you start with decreases to shape the dress. The decrease is called a "dart" decrease. So, I am looking at the pattern and I notice that there is only one dart on the front and one on the back. But they're not centered, they're off to the side, so there have to be left and right darts, right? Hmmmm... Hubby remarked that maybe the dress is for somebody with a hunchback. Well, it's gotta be for somebody with a hunchback and only one boob! SORRY - but I was really pissed off. Here I am, very excited about a knitting project (it seems I finally came out of my knitting funk) and with very expensive yarn (thankfully the fiber dogs don't need to go to college, so mommy can splurge on yarn...) which I don't want to rip.

In addition, I also discovered that chart 2, which is not printed in the magazine – VK tells you to go to their website for it – is missing on the webpage. OK – I guess you can tell I was pretty mad at that point.

WHAT TO DO??? Well, I went on VK's website to complain. And they tell you bluntly in an automated reply:

Thank you for your message. We try very hard to address all of your questions and concerns in a timely manner, and we ask for your patience and understanding when we don't get to them right away. Please allow 2-3 weeks for a response. Feel free to e-mail again if you have not heard back as we sometimes experience computer/internet problems. We do value your input!

I can see they're trying VERY hard. How about if you try a little harder to publish a magazine without errors in the first place? It's not like it's a free mag... But I know that VK is known for lots of mistakes in their magazine. Maybe they should change their name to "Vague Knitting"? (I wish I'd come up with this but it was one of the girls at Knitch.)

Anyway, surprisingly, not long after the automated message, I got a real email from VK with an apology and a promise that the chart would be on the website in a few hours. And even more surprisingly – it was. At that point I felt a little better. But that still didn't solve the dart decrease problem.

Since I didn’t want to wait 2-3 weeks to hear back from VK with corrections, I emailed Lily Chin directly. I thought, what the hell… She is coming to teach workshops at the Atlanta Knitting Guild in November, and since I am organizing that whole weekend for the AKG, I am already in email contact with her. I thought I’ll give it a try and bother her very politely. Well – get this – Lily emailed me back the same evening. YEAH – LILY YOU ROCK!!! Here is what she said in her reply to me:

No, there are two "darts" each front and back for 4 total. If the mag took my directions and messed them up, I didn't catch it (they NEVER send me the final edited version before going to print) so I'd ask Vogue about what they did to the instructions. I'm in Chicago for Stitches Midwest right now and can't help further anyways as everything is on my desktop computer. LC

Well, I emailed VK as well and - gee, what a surprise - haven’t heard from them. But while I was at VK’s website again, I saw this:

Look at the advertisement in the right sidebar. See Knitch? You guys rock, too. I can’t wait until they finish their upstairs renovations. Kim is putting in an industrial kitchen for dye workshops, a washer for felting workshops, a gigantic table for the knitting groups, a sofa & TV for knitting movies, a spinning and lace corner... SO AWESOME!!!

So, coming back to the lace dress disaster… If you know me, I can be VERY impatient – of course never while teaching somebody something – but when I need to get going with a project. This whole mess was keeping me from knitting with this delicious Tilli Tomas silk… So I sat down yesterday morning and re-charted the lace dress and it seems to work out with the number of stitches. Here is a view of the charts – before and after:

And here is how far I got:

Happily, once I got the corrections all sorted out, I found that I don't have to rip a single stitch. YAY!

I am off to enter more stash into Ravely and trying out the new chart for the lace dress. I’ll keep you posted. HAVE A GREAT (rest of) WEEKEND!!!