There are SO many posts (on this incredibly helpful and useful forum) to do with trying to understand patterns. Can anyone explain to me why they have to be so impossibly cryptic? When you buy or download a free pattern, or look in a book, the pattern (wherever you find it) is a pattern about knitting. It’s not about cooking, or driving, or bringing up children, or pottery, or any other subject whatsoever. It’s about knitting. Why does it matter if it takes a bit longer, or uses up another page, or talks baby-talk to the already initiated? The experienced can always skip something; the inexperienced can’t invent something that isn’t there. Why are so many assumptions made? Where is the empathy for the poor person who needs a helping hand? What else has the pattern writer got to do that is more important than bothering to put themselves in the shoes of a knitter -even sometimes an experienced knitter - and finding a way to be clear instead of opaque? I’m driven nearly insane by having to go over and over something to understand it. We are not stupid people! We are not trying to do neurosurgery here, just understand instructions. I get it that abbreviating complicated instructions is important, and that endless repetition is equally confusing, but still there is room for just imagining what it is like to be reading this and trying to get to grips with it, just having the kindness to realise that an extra sentence might make the whole experience a happy one instead of a nightmare!!