Yarn Over Eureka

I started working on a new sweater as soon as I finished my first one in April. It's the Green Gable from Zephyr Style, the same girls who designed the Juliet sweater I made. In February when Yarniverse had their 40% off sale I bought enough Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece to make the Green Gable sweater and the Rusted Root sweater. I picked out Peridot, a pale green for my Green Gable and buttercream, a soft yellow for the Rusted Root. When I made the Juliet sweater I knew something was slightly off with my stitches I had too many. I could never figure it out but it turned okay and the blocking helped and probably I'm the only person that notices its imperfections.

Green Gable - WRONG

For Mother's Day I made my mom a reusable grocery bag out of Hempathy, a hemp yarn. (It's actually not quite finished because I still need to make and sew on the handle. Whoops.) The bag is an open lace pattern made with yarn overs. Again I ended up with extra stitches. It's slightly off too, it doesn't look terrible just not perfectly executed.

I saw a cotton lace/cable shrug on Ravelry I wanted to make too. I started it and again more yarn overs and more stitch problems. I didn't want to go to the yarn stores for help, I wanted to figure it out on my own. I got pretty far into the Green Gable three different times before ripping it out and starting it over again because I couldn't the stitches correct. I knew I had to be doing something incorrect with the yarn overs, there was no other explanation. I looked online at KnittingHelp.com, I looked in my Stitch & Bitch books, I Googled 'yarn over help' nothing. From the video on KnittingHelp.com I knew I was doing my yarn over correctly but I was still ending up with a leftover stitch. Finally I took a piece of paper and wrote out my stitches and tried to figure out where that extra stitch was coming from. After half an hour of being near tears I figured it out. I was making a yarn over and then knitting a stitch. That's wrong, you're supposed to place the yarn in a certain position and then follow your pattern, whether that be knitting a stitch or knitting two together in the case of the Green Gable sweater.

Green Gable - RIGHT (it's the same yarn, the picture above is with a flash, the picture below is sans the flash)

I was still concerned that was the right thing to do but I decided to go ahead and knit a few rounds anyway. Well apparently I was right, that was my problem. I'm almost all the way finished with the lace portion of the sweater and when I compare it to photos of other people's on Ravelry it looks right. So now I'm excited to finish this sweater, the shrug and make another bag for my mom that' has the proper number of stitches and thus the proper lace pattern.

Big sigh of relief. I'm not a complete knitting moron.