Nicky Epstein's Cardigan with Cabled Points

Has anybody ever successfully knit Nicky Epstein's Cardigan with Cabled Points?

The pattern is in a supplement with this month's Knitting magazine (UK). I find it suspicious that I've just trawled through fifty-four pages of Google images and the whole of Flickr, and I can't find a single photograph of the finished garment. (I'd try Ravelry, but I'm still 31,783rd in the queue to join!)

I'm asking because I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon unravelling the damn thing. I am amazed at how utterly wrong a pattern can be, and still make it through to publication!

I was making the smallest size, for which the instructions are:

Cast on 116.
Row 1: K12, skp, k1, k2tog, k12 - rep to end.

Except that first row only adds up to 114 stitches.

I decided to persevere, pulling the two extra stitches off the needle, carefully unpicking the slip knot and unravelling them, in order not to have to unravel the entire thing straight away.

Row 2: p. Not much that can go wrong there.

Row 3: k11, skp, k1, k2tog, k11 - rep to end.

Uh-oh. These decreases don't line up neatly with the ones below. (Which is what we want if we're making points.) I persevere, and reach the end of my last k11 with a mere seven stitches left over.

This is not going well.

I break out the calculator.

Anyone who knows me will be aware that my maths skills are pretty much non-existent, so there may have been a certain amount of swearing involved at this point. I carefully work out the new repeats, unravel the whole thing, and start again with 114 stitches. Unfortunately my carefully worked out maths is completely wrong, and I have to unravel the first three rows and start again for the third time.

Third time lucky - I put in lots and lots of stitch markers where I want the decreases for the points to be. It's like knitting a porcupine, but at least I now have clues as to what I'm supposed to be doing. I decrease away happily.

Unfortunately, by row 9 I already have fewer stitches than I'm supposed to have at the end of row 13, and my points aren't coming out the right shape (according to the picture) at all. I've checked the internet for corrections, and all I can find is something relating to the numbering of rows on the sleeves. Nothing at all which mentions the maths for the points is all wrong.

It's at this point that I give up, unravel the entire thing again, and start knitting a nice simple cardigan from Simply Knitting March 2007. I'm adding some shaping to the back to make it a bit less like a giant rectangle with two cables down the front, but so far it's knitting up beautifully and I can't fault the pattern at all.



I'd be quite interested to know whether anybody at Knitting actually had to knit the cardigan that's shown in the picture, or whether it was a stock photo from one of Nicky Epstein's books. Either way, I'd be interested to know how a pattern which is so completely wrong can make it through to publication without anybody apparently having knitted it! The mistakes are obvious by the second row, so you'd be aware of the problem straight away.



If anybody does actually have a list of errata for this pattern, I'd really like to see it. I really want to knit it, as it's a beautiful cardigan, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to fix the pattern by myself!