Matchy -matchy

Safely in the mail, the Big Pink Thing is out of my life and making it’s way to my friend. (I sort of miss it.) I’m tracking the package online, having paid a rather exorbitant amount of money for speed to make up for how long it took to dry. They are promising it will arrive today by five, but I know Canada Post is a big fat liar and don’t expect much until Monday morning. I took many pictures before it left. When she gets it…you’ll see it.

When I got back from the post office I sat back down with Juno. It’s very simple knitting so far, and after the knitting on Big Pink, pleasantly straightforward and lovely. It’s a pretty big gauge too, so it zooms along.

I’ve got both sleeves done, the back done, the left front done and I’m motoring through the right. I’m knitting quickly since I’ve started to fear I won’t have enough yarn, and there is part of my brain that – even though I know it can’t be true, believes that knitting things quickly uses less yarn. (Oh c’mon. You know you think that sometimes too.)

Junopieces0405

The only thing that slowed me down was that after I knit the back, I couldn’t make the fronts work right. I cast on and ripped it out four times before it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, since I am a pretty solid knitter and this is a pretty simple pattern, that the fault did not lie with me. I checked the Rowan website and sure enough…there’s a mistake in the pattern. Several. Might want to print those out and stick them in your magazine if you think you might have even the vaguest notion of ever knitting this one.

Thing is, while I’m sorting out the fronts, I notice that there are corrections listed for the back as well, except I’ve already knit the back and it knit up just fine, near as I could tell. Fine that is, until I knit the fronts the right way and discovered that the error is that the ribs aren’t going to line up at the shoulder. The correction establishes a completely different order to the back ribbing. Left as it is, the ribbing is going to be entirely offset, rows of knits butting up against rows of purls – there will be no lovely and orderly matching of ribbing at the seam. The side seams will also be not quite right, but there are increases and decreases along them, so I’m not convinced the blunder will be obvious.

Junorfront0405

I’m making up my mind now. Considering that the shoulder seams are hidden under the big collar and the sides are perhaps not a glaring botch-up…does it matter that it won’t match? Do I let it go? Do I rip it back and reknit the whole piece on principle? Is it going to bug me forever if I don’t? I could simply flip over the back, making the right side the wrong side, the knits all purls, but then my cast on edge wouldn’t match all the way around the sweater and that would show, and I think that would drive me nuts. Perhaps I could reknit the left front and the half of the right front and make them deliberately wrong to have it match the back? It would be less work than redoing the whole back, since I do have a half a front to go. I keep looking at the whole thing and feeling pissed that the pattern was wrong trying to figure it out. One part of me keeps saying “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” and the other keeps saying “Perhaps you are a smidge overwrought about this thing.”

How much does perfection and matching matter?

Sigh. To rip, or not to rip. That is the question.