Obsessed with Project Runway

[Sorry, longest post ever. Feel free to skip down to the knitting content.]

I recently got hooked on Project Runway and have watched all the episodes for this season. I LOVE IT. Pardon me while I ramble on about it for a while. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a fashion design competition where one contestant is eliminated each episode. Project Runway and 24 are the shows that make having television worthwhile for me. I was television-less for most of the past decade, but now I have found the light.

I've been so obsessed with Project Runway that I've been scoping out their auctions. I have to agree with the bidders, Nick's Barbie dress was AWESOME, but $1700?!?! Wow. One thing that struck me is that Santino's and Nick's designs generally make more money than other's relative to how they were ranked by the judges. Daniel V, on the other hand, consistently seems to pull in a lot less money relative to his scoring. Santino and Nick probably get the most airtime, and Daniel V the least because he's just so damn calm. I can't tell if Santino and Nick are rated more highly by the audience because there's more exposure, they exude more confidence, or they're just more likeable. That can't possibly be the case for Santino though, can it? He's such an ass! Ok, I like him anyway. I've always been a fan of absurdity, and boy is he absurd.

And here's where I trash talk the contestants. I think Kara will be the next to go. Her designs are uninspired, and her main purpose seems to be to add tension to the show. She's always so stressed out. Take a damn chill pill, girl. As much as Andrae's last design was fabulous, he's inconsistent. I don't think he'll make it into the top three. Santino seems to be on a downward spiral, but the judges are reluctant to dump him because he adds a lot energy to the show. That, and when he's good, he's really good (I loved his first two designs). But when he's bad, he's bloody awful. That last dress was TERRIBLE! It's hard for me to narrow it down after that. I have to admit, I find Daniel V strangely attractive. It's probably because he doesn't talk. Silent men are hot. Or something.

Honestly, if I could pick any of the designers to design a wardrobe for me, it probably would have been Guadalupe. I don't care if I end up on a worst dressed list. In fact, I usually describe my fashion sense as "ugly". I love ugly. I thought her first and second designs were seriously awesome. Even her losing dress was something I would have worn, detachable flowers and all. Detachable flowers! I can not believe she pitched that to Nicky Hilton.

Okay, enough about Project Runway for now. I'll tie it all in with knitting in my next post, I swear.

Speaking of swearing, I guess I might as well add some knitting content to this post. I've been cursing out Vogue Knitting for a few days now. See, I wanted to take a little knitting break in preparation for the Knitting Olympics. Unlike K, I'm not in training as much as I just want to finish something before I start The Challenge (still to be determined). So I put down the D2 sweater. Sorry, I won't be back to that until *after* the Olympics. Instead I picked up the latest VK and looked for something easy to knit. I wanted chunky and mindless, so I settled on this ridiculous "dress".

Yes, I am totally going to wear that. I'm using Jaeger Chamonix from my stash:

Anyway, I decided to work the piece in the round instead of flat because I dislike seams with chunky yarns. The pattern set off a lot of red flags for me immediately, but I told myself it's a simple stockinette/ribbed raglan shaped dress. Turn off your brain and just trust Vogue for once. How can they mess up such a simple pattern? Ha! What a bad idea. Last night, I ended up dropping down about 500 stitches and using a crochet hook to ladder them up in ribbing. The problems?

- I know it's supposed to be an asymmetrical design (which makes it especially annoying that the picture doesn't show the left side), but when the ribbing for the front left didn't match the ribbing for the back left, I was a bit concerned. But hey, asymmetry.
- I hate when patterns don't tell you if they've allowed for a selvedge stitch or not. This one didn't. It matched up as 2x2 ribbing as written, with no seam allowance, so I assumed no selvedge stitch.
- The small size for this "very close fitting" sweater is 35 inches from the waist on up to the bust. I now realize I really should have sized this sucker down. It's probably going to sag unattractively at the waist. Probably in the chest too.
- This pattern was ranked as "experienced". Huh? Simple elongated raglan? Oh right, in VK speak that means "this pattern is wrong and you will have to fix it".
- The stockinette edging will curl. Well, it's offset by some ribbing, so that's not so bad. And hey, this "dress" is so short, it's meant for flashing a little extra, right?

Anyway, to make the long story short, the pattern is all wrong, and I'm not even sure where to begin with how wrong it is. First, if you look at the photo and compare with the pattern, I guess there *is* a seam allowance on the right side. It just happens to be two stitches! The left side is even worse. I don't think there is a seam allowance at all. I am guessing that they meant to put a selvedge stitch on each side of the front and back and somehow translated that into two selvedge stitches on the right side of each piece instead. But that's not the only thing weird about the left side. The ribbing is all messed up. There should be an extra set of ribbing on the front left. This is where I had to drop down stitches and crochet hook them up. Extra annoying because the ribbing is next to the hip decreases, so I had to drop down a lot of additional columns of knits to redo those. I didn't figure out exactly how it was wrong until I got up to the armholes and started the raglan decreases. Remind to self: Never trust VK.

But hey, I think it's looking okay now.