what happened was...

That's the name of a movie, too, but more to the point, let me say that gauge wasn't the problem, and I feel stoopid for thinking it could be. Really stupid. Because that doesn't even make any sense. The real culprit: either a poorly-written pattern, or I can't read. Since I've always done pretty well on those verbal ability tests, I think it's the pattern. (Plus, sometimes there are things that can be read two ways, and you can read one of these things over and over and it's still the same to you, and then one time, boom!, you read it again and it reads differently. But maybe no-one else ever has this experience. The phenomenon is similar to that picture of a vase that is also a picture of two people in profile, if you look at the "negative space." Anyway, that's what I'm sayin'.)

I went down two needle sizes, and no luck. So I looked at the back of the next issue of Interweave to see if I could find anything in the "Oops!" section, and no dice. I decided to try swatching again, instead of knitting across the whole piece, which was taking to long (duh), and when I did the first two rows I realized I hadn't offset them correctly. Bingo! That was the problem: the pattern rows weren't lined up correctly, so they were making a vague pattern (which is why I thought it had to do with gauge), but not the right one.

This is how the instructions are written:

Work 1 (2,2,3,3,2) st(s) in St st, beg with Row 1 (of the pattern), work center 96 (101, 106, 111, 116, 126) sts according to diagonal pattern, work remaining 1 (1,2,2,3,1) st(s) in St st. Work through 4 rows of diagonal pattern 5 times.

What I read was "Work the extra stitches on the beginning and end of Row 1, work the other rows as written," because I figured that maybe the offset worked out to be the same, and the pattern notes said that, if you don't have enough sts left at the end of a row for a complete pattern repeat, just knit in St st. I guess I am just plagued by my own stupidity.

This is how I would've written it:

For pattern rows 1 & 3, work 1(etc...) st(s) in St st, work center 96 (etc...) st(s) in diagonal pattern, work remaining 1 (etc...) st(s) in St st. Purl all stitches in pattern rows 2 & 4. Work through four rows of diagonal pattern five times.

Alternatively, they could've been very annoyingly specific: Instructions for R1, for R2, for R3, for R4, repeat five times.

Frankly, I don't want to be forced to work very, very hard to read patterns.

All the while I was figuring this out, I was watching the Planet of the Apes marathon on AMC. Now that I have seen all five (who knew there were so many--I thought there were only four), I suppose I can die a fulfilled woman. Later, I was told I sounded like a Planet of the Apes geek when I said this about Bill Frist: "Someone should send him to the Planet of the Apes to be dissected by Zira, see how he likes it." After all, the man gives a whole new meaning to "curiosity killed the cat." What gall, to adopt animals from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animals, and then to take them home and torture them. This is why potential applicants get screened these days, I suppose. And yes, I did sound like a geek, but after watching four movies in less than 24 hours (I've seen the first one before), what d'you expect?

The best thing about the last three offerings in the Apes series is: no Charlton Heston. There's only so much I can take of that man parading around in a loincloth, and that's not much at all. Roddy McDowall, however, is in all of them--he plays his Cornelius, and then he plays Cornelius's son, Caesar. Recycling!