Argh!!!!!!

Have you done a pattern that makes you want to throw your knitting across the room? I've been dreaming of doing stranded knitting recently what with tons of people's lovely FOs gracing the blog world. So I decided that I wanted to make a pair of Selbu Mittens (Rav link). They are pretty, stranded, and have snowflakes on them. What could be better?

First, I bought the yarn (jumping the gun, I know). Next, I ILL'ed the Folk Mittens book. Then, I checked to see if there was any errata for the Selbu mittens. There was. So I printed out the corrections. Next step was to CO for the mittens. Being a smart knitter (hahahahahahahaha), I decided to make detailed notes about what I was doing for the first mitten so I could replicate it exactly in the second. OK, everything is fine and the mitten is going well. Oh, wait.

When I reached the chart, it was like my brain couldn't translate what it was seeing. So the corrections state that you need to increase one stitch for the body pattern. Fine. But what about the 6 stitches of the border? Where do those come from? They are 6 additional stitches the instructions and chart don't say anything about. But I can fudge it and just add them. Everything is still somewhat OK.

But I could NOT figure out the thumb gores. Here is a picture of the corrected chart and thumb gores.

I just couldn't figure out where the thumb gore was supposed to start. Let's look at the purple outline. Does it start on the left or the right of the purple outline? Argh!

**ETA: I am an idiot. Yup, an idiot. I shouldn't have worried about the 6 stitches thing and the thumb gore so much. Over lunch, I realized that you just start doing the chart of the mittens (if you have the book, you can see the full chart or you could go here to see the corrected chart with the full pattern). When you reach the right side of the purple border, you do the three stitches of the gore chart rather than the 8 stitches in the middle of the purple. Does that make sense? That leaves you with 3 stitches left over which will be the 3 stitches of the other border. So you don't have to increase any stitches in order to make the border. Duh! I can't do these higher knitting problems.