Dear SweaterBabe,
I know I am in over my head, but I can never seem to understand some patterns.
This is for an afghan.
Cast on 219 sts. work seed st for 2 (I am guessing this is 2 rows.)
Next row; work 7 seed sts over next 205 sts, increasing 21 evenly spaced;(where did the 205 sts come from I thought we were working with 219 sts?)work 7 seed sts--240 sts.
Help !! I thought myself to knit and for some reason I really have a hard time with some patterns, what am I missing?
--Brenda Morton
Dear Brenda,
I'm wondering if your pattern is just missing a LOT of punctuation!
Here is my best guess to what it is saying:
Cast on 219 sts. work seed st for 2
I think it might mean 2" OR 2 Rows. Is there no photo to go with the afghan? You should be able to see if there is a 2" seed stitch border at the beginning or what just looks like 2 rows.
Next row; work 7 seed sts over next 205 sts, increasing 21 evenly spaced;(where did the 205 sts come from I thought we were working with 219 sts?)work 7 seed sts--240 sts.
This reads to me: Work seed st over next 7 sts, then increase 21 sts evenly across the next 205 sts, work seed st over the remaining 7 sts.
The 7 sts on either side are for the seed stitch border. Assuming this is probably close to 2", I actually now believe the first instruction above is to do seed stitch for 2" to get a border that is the same width all around.
To calculate how to increase 21 sts evenly across 205 sts, you need to do some math:
205/21 = 9.76. So, if you were to increase after every 9th st, that would not be so even since 21 x 9 = 189, which still leaves 205 - 189 = 16 sts to work. Looks like you need to do something like increase every alternating 9th and 10th stitch to have it be more evenly across. [Note, at this point, if you are not so concerned about it being SO even, you can do the increase after every 9th st and be done with the math.] ALSO, when I say "increase after a stitch,", I am assuming the "make 1" increase technique.
If you map that out, it looks like this:
Seed st for 7 sts; [work 9 sts, m1, work 10 sts, m1] 10 times, work 15 sts; seed st for 7 sts.
I would probably take the 15 sts at the one end and the 9 sts at the other end and split it out better...
Seed st for 7 sts; work 12 sts, [m1, work 10 sts, m1, work 9 sts] 10 times, work 3 sts; seed st for 7 sts.
I'm saying "work" because I'm not clear from the pattern if you are still in seed stitch for the 205 sts or in some other stitch pattern!
Unfortunately, this seems like a poorly written pattern. I would not be surprised if you encounter more confusing instructions as you keep going. I HIGHLY recommend that you read through the rest and see if it makes sense. If it really doesn't, consider finding another pattern! To me, it's not worth the aggravation to work through a pattern that is just NOT written with clear instructions.
Hope that helps!
Best,
SweaterBabe