Whew! Now that it looks better, I’ll show it to you…. When I took the photos of my Apres Surf Hoodie on Monday, I placed the body strategically so you couldn’t see the sides because I was embarrassed by how the sides looked. Early on, I had decided that I didn’t want to deal with increasing and decreasing in pattern while I was knitting in the round, so I started at the hem with an extra 8 stitches in stockinette at each side. These stitches got decreased out to the waist, then increased back in to the bust. And, they looked terrible!

I’m glad the bottom side sections of stockinette are there because I will use them for the steeks for the side vents, but the side stockinette sections at the bust height were just plain ugly. Soooo, I dropped those sections back to the first point that there were 8 stitches after increasing, and knit the dropped sections back up in pattern. It gave my hands something to do while I was proofing the podcast today.

At first, it was hard to figure out what round in the pattern I was on after dropping all those rows, so that I could match to the body pattern. On the first side, I got lucky on my second try by eyeballing it. Then, I figured out that if I counted the strands in the unraveled portion, then that was how many rows down in the pattern I was (I knew what row in the pattern I was on at the top). So, I could just count backwards the number of row repeats and pick up the pattern confidently at the right spot. Why is the simplest solution often the most elusive?

Pattern: Apres Surf Hoodie from Interweave Knits Summer 2008
Yarn: Shine Sport Sand (discontinued color from my stash)
Needles: Knit Picks US 1 (2.50mm) 32″ nickel plated fixed circular for the body and two 24″ nickel plated fixed circulars for the sleeves AND 6″ nickle plated dpns for fixing my mistake! <