Don't believe everything you read

Even in knitting patterns. Remember when I was all excited because I'd figured out what the doily pattern writer meant by her 'fagot' stitch? Remember? Well, she was wrong (or the editor changed it and was wrong or the type setter changed it and was wrong). Someone was wrong. Doing 2 overs and a purl 2 together adds an additional stitch everytime you do it. Everytime. It was wrong. If you only do 1 over, however, and the purl 2 together, it looks like this:



That's right. Once I counted and recounted and reread and recounted, I decided to go with the 1 over and it mostly worked out. Actually it worked until row 3. Then I ended up with 1 stitch too many. But if I adjusted the pattern to come out even on row 3, then I was lacking a stitch I needed for row 4. I needed to add a stitch. Sounds easy enough but then the question is, where do you add it for the pattern to still come out? Here's what I had to work with:

Row 3: Knit 8, over, narrow, knit 4, over, narrow, knit 3, (over, narrow) twice, over 4 times, knit 3, fagot.

"Narrow" is just knit 2 together or decrease.
"Over" is a yarn over.
"Fagot" is yarn over, purl 2 together.

Row 4: Fagot, knit 4, purl 1, knit1, purl 1 (in loop), knit 24.

I knew I couldn't add a stitch to the end of Row 3 because the "over 4 times" has to fall where it was. On the first repeat shown above, I added a stitch to the "knit 3" section and made that "knit 4". The problem with that is that it throws off the pattern on following rows. Not much but it does. Then I realized as I looked at the other rows that this is the only place where the pattern has a even number in the section where it says "Knit 8". All the other rows have odd numbers. So I made that "knit 9" and Bob's your uncle. It worked out perfectly.

All of that for 1 little stitch! But when you're knitting this type of lace, 1 stitch matters. So now I'm happy with it and am busy knitting it out. Once you get the pattern right, it's a pretty easy little pattern. I'm not the biggest fan of the garter stitch, as you may know, but now I've got it figured out, I think it would be easy to convert it to a stockinette pattern. I think that would be prettier...but that's just me.