Jayda's poncho

How-to Questions
1

Hi all,

This poncho pattern is listed on this site as a free pattern; it is from knitlist. So anyone can look at the complete pattern.

I was just practicing a few rows to see if I’d like this pattern enough to knit for my niece. It’s really cute in the picture.

Anyway on the second row, there’s a problem with the directions, I think. They are:
Cast on 44 stitches. Do Not join.
Row 1: K1, pm, K1, pm, K8, pm, K1, pm, K22, pm K1, pm, K1

pm is the designer’s abbreviation for place marker. The trouble is that all the stitches on row 1 do not add up to 44, but only 35. At least that’s how I read it. I’ve check for corrections at knitlist but cannot find any.

Am I just having a bad day reading this pattern? :frowning: What do I not understand? Thanks for any suggestions any of you may have.

Joyce

2

It looks like you cast on 44, but on the first row are only knitting 35 and then purling back. You’re working short rows for shaping.

3

Thanks for your help, and I have done as you said with my practice yarn.

Unfortunately I’ve run into other problems that I can’t solve. Let me quote a bit more of the pattern, even though it’s linked from this website.

Cast on 44 stitches. Do Not join.
Row 1: K1, pm, K1, pm, K8, pm, K1, pm, K22, pm K1, pm, K1
Row 2: Purl Back
Increase rows: Continue working back and forth M1 before and after each marker on right side rows until there are 3 sts before the first marker. Purl back
Next row: Inc 1, work remainder of row as an increase row ending with Inc 1. Purl back
Continue with this sequence until there are 100 sts on the needle.
Work 1 increase row (MI before and after each marker) cast on 10 sts and join.

After row 2, I’ve knitted M1’s before and after each marker even though it’s very tight. It does not indicate that I should now knit the ones not knitted in row 1, but it seems logical to do that. Also there’s no other place in the pattern that specifically mentions these stitches. Then the instructions say continue until there are 3 stitches before the first marker. It doesn’t say three M1 stitches, just stitches. so I did just that. If I knit this row twice with purl rows in between,I’m adding 12 stitches on each knit row. Here I have 68 total stitches.

Next row adds an inc 1 at the first and last stitch of the row. So now I’m adding 14 stitches for each knit row. After knitting two of those with the purl rows in between, I have 96 stitches. However as you can see the pattern indicates I should have 100 stitches. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to get 100 stitches. On paper I have tried adding different numbers of the 12 and 14 increase rows, and I never get 100.

I’m very confused. I do know how to do the stitches; I just can’t follow what the writer means. I really want to knit this so I don’t want to give up.

Can anyone make sense of this and/or where I’ve gotten confused? Also there is one abbreviation while knitting the hood that i don’t understand. It’s “slm”.

Thanks again for any help. I really don’t have the words to say how invaluable your help is.

Joyce

4

slm is probably just slip marker.

As for the math, I get the same figures you do.

What do you think if you added 14 stitches every time?

44 + (14 x 4) = 100

5

After I posted my last message, I began looking on the internet for any other references to Jayda’s poncho. I went to knitlist.com and looked for corrections. Nothing. Then I did a search at knitlist for Chris Carroll, who wrote the pattern. Here’s what I found:

I want to apologize for the error in this pattern I sent for the Knitlist
exchange.

The first row should read:
K1, pm, K1, pm, K8, pm, K1, pm, K22, pm, K1, pm, K8,pm K1, pm K1

I inadvertently omitted the second K1, pm, K8, pm while typing. Thank
you to the Knitlister who notified me of the error.

(other stuff omitted–didn’t apply to poncho)

Chris
If you have a moment, please check out my photos at
http://www.picturetrail.com/gunhild

Thanks Ingrid for your advice. I was about to do something like you said to make it come out to 100, but I really didn’t want to. I haven’t checked yet to see if I can get exactly 100 stitches with these corrections, but I am hoping so.

Maybe this will also help anyone else who tries to make Jayda’s poncho.
:cheering:

6

Sheesh! You know, when I first saw this pattern, my thought was that part of that row was left out, but since you’d expect things like this to be close to correct, I doubted myself. :rollseyes:

Hopefully the math will work out now. I guess it would have been a pretty funky shaped poncho if you had just increases on that first section, huh?