Rip-Off!

[rant]

I am seriously pissed off at the moment.

I really feel ripped off at this moment in time.

I have been wanting to knit this ‘Baby Surprise Jacket’ for ages, ever since I saw the pattern. It is knit in one whole piece and sewn along two seams and viola! Jacket.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See, it’s so pretty and really quite unusal. The pattern is over forty years old and was designed by knitting guru Elizabeth Zimmerman.

I found out you could buy a pattern over the web and what with postage cause it had to be sent from USA (why they couldn’t have downloadable pdf’s) it cost me £5.00. Pretty expensive for a frickin’ pattern.

Then I open it and it’s not so much a pattern but a spattering of loose instructions. ARGHHHH! Just general comments, like ‘AT 5 ridges, inc 9 stitches (K3, M1) across end sections,’. WTF? What so is that (K3, M1) all on the same row 4 on one side, five on the other or is that (K3, M1) across the end over the next 4 rows?

I’m totally fucking bamboozled already and I’m not even past the fourth row.

When I pay money for a pattern I excpect a pattern, not just the scribbles that the designer wrote down when she originally designed it. And because it’s 40 years old, I have no doubt I’m not the first person to have this problem. So I have to ask, does she excpect everyone to dechiper her scribblings. Is it knitting snobbery? Only designing for people who have the knitting chops to decode the secret expert knitters language she has used. Why, oh why hasn’t a comprehensive pattern been done. A revision of the original so us ordinary peons can use it without being made to feel like a fucking idiot!

Perhaps I should be flattered that it is expected that I can decipher this but I feel I have just paid money for something I can’t use. Not without going to Ravelry and trawling through many of the posts there about this very subject, or finding a podcast kint-a-long and take pointers from someone who has already had to decipher this fucking mess of instructions.

[/rant ]