I really shouldn't start projects at 11pm.

I'm several months ahead of my Knitter's Almanac project. It helps that I'm skipping all the fair isle and the projects for summer are small.

Anyway, I thought I'd pick up a new project using the Gedifra Florida that I picked up for $2 a ball while at Webs on my trip back to MA for Reunion. It's a DK and I've been wanting to do a cheap-and-chearful shawl with some DK for a while now. So much faster to knit when you can use 8s instead of 5s.

So, I cast on for A Handsome Triangle from Victorian Lace Today. And I had to frog at 8 rows, because I realized that it was terribly lopsided. I was working purely from the chart, only I failed to notice that the chart was only half the shawl and I needed to work to one side and then work backwards.

Ok, problem solved. I cast on again.

Only, this time with 4 increases per row instead of 2, the shape of the shawl was decidedly not triangular. Perhaps it would block out? I soldiered on.

Then, I noticed that the photograph in the book looked NOTHING like what I was doing. I had a large, basically stockinette section at the beginning, and the photo in the book had the lace starting right away. What the heck? Why would they include a graph that didn't have you start the lace until 22 rows in when the sample had the lace start right away?

I checked double checked the errata page on the XRX books website to see if they'd fixed the graph, and nope. Surely they would have caught something like that by now. So, again, I picked up the sticks and determined to finish the first repeat of the lace pattern.

This is when I really got frustrated. Not only was it not triangular, not only was my lace starting too high up, but now the lace actually looked NOTHING like the lace in the sample. I was ready to give up. I figured I must be doing something fundamentally wrong with how I was reading the graph. It was the first time I'd used a graph that you had to read backwards and forwards, so perhaps I needed to reverse some stitches or something. I checked the information in the back and it seemed like I was doing it right.

So, I googled. And I found several photos, but one looked like the sample, and the other looked like mine, and I didn't know what was going on. So, I checked on Ravelry. And while I was looking at an example there, it all finally clicked. Though you start by casting on only 4 stitches, this pattern does, indeed, start at the NECK, not at the bottom point. And so, the reason why I didn't see the large stockinette section was because it was not in the close-up of the shawl. And the reason why it wasn't triangular is because the increases are actually making the hypotenuse. And the reason why my lace looked NOTHING like the pattern was because I'm knitting it upside-down

Good gravy. All of this probably would have been apparent had I started it after dinner instead of late at night while watching The Prestige on cable.