I'm an idiot.

I'm trying to use the recovered yarn from Anhinga to design a vest. Got that? Yes? Good. I'm not sure how most people go about the process of creating a new torso covering, but my way involves lots and lots and lots of math. Also diagrams. I do about 3 hours of measuring and calculating whenever I'm changing something, quintuple checking my results so that I can get the fit I'm looking for, even if I'm just modifying an already existing pattern. (like, say, the grey sweater from the bowels of Hell.)  All that to say that I have a fairly good idea of what I'm doing when it comes to deciding how far to knit.

Unless I have an aneurysm. At that point all bets are off.

Allow me to explain: The cable border is 16 rows to a repeat, and repeats are roughly 3.25" in length. When I sat down to do my first half of the bottom border, I said to myself, "Well, we need 18 of these, so I'll knit 9 here and then do the corner chart."

Some of you have caught the error already. 18 repeats of the cable pattern, plus the corner charts which are roughly 5" each, means that the finished circumference of the lower band would be 68.5". That's 5' 8.5" of border. My hips are 41" around at the widest point, giving me more than 2 and a half feet of ease.

So what happened? Well, my notebook says to work the band half for roughly 18", not 18 repeats. The odd part is that my brain caught the mistake, even if it couldn't figure out what had gone wrong--I only worked 7 repeats instead of 9 in the right band, and 6 in the left. Even then, I didn't figure it out until I was blocking the finished bottom band, and the total measurement was close to 50". It's fixed now, but I'm nervous for the rest of this sweater if I can make such a painfully obvious mistake and not catch it for days.

I've picked up the body stitches and I'm working through my waist shaping. I'll let you know if the result is "person shaped."