Lies, damn lies, and swatches

I have been lied to. I have been let down. Betrayed. Mislead. Scammed by a piece of string.

I know it's not all that unusual for a swatch to lie, but boy, this was a whopper, a BFL, a lie of truly epic proportions.

I'm attempting to knit a DROPS cardigan in DK-weight cotton, but I have to say at this point, it's not going well. It starts like this:

I swatch. I measure. My gauge is too small. I block, just in case. I measure. Still too small. Okay, I rip out the swatch.

I go up a needle size. I swatch. I measure. I block again, just in case. This time, the gauge is perfect.

I cast on 118 stitches, which should give me a 22.5"-wide piece of knitting.

It doesn't.

I work a few rows, measure, and stare blankly at my tape measure. I finger-block the knitting experimentally. I am four inches in to this sweater, and the 22.5" back? It is 26" wide. And that's before I attempt to stretch it. Remember, this sweater is cotton, which means it's supposed to have negative ease.

Four inches over 26 inches is quite a change, so I go down two needle sizes and start over. I would have declared it beer o'clock, except that my SnB meets in a decidedly dry coffee shop. Instead, I chugged a hot chocolate and cast on 118 stitches again.

I knit to the beginning of the lace section and stop to take a measurement, because now I am wise to the cotton's wily ways. This proves to be a valuable moment of clarity, as the 22.5" back now measures 24" precisely.

At this point, I feel I ought to offer an apology to the other patrons of the shop, as my remarks about the sweater became a bit heated. My engineer buddy and I did some quick math- in a moment of stunningly clear foresight, I had brought a calculator along in my knitting bag- and I realized that there was no way on earth I was going to get gauge with this yarn. I would be knitting on pins before I got the required gauge.

I needed to reduce the number of stitches.

At this point, having been working on this confounded sweater for approximately five hours, with a small break to crash the sale at the LYS, I decided I was done. Really done. To console myself, I attempted to begin a simple triangle shawl, could not figure out how many stitches to cast on, could not figure out where to place the decreases, ripped it all off the needles, and called it a night.

An arithmetic analysis of my knitting tonight would show that I achieved the impossible: a negative stitch velocity. I knit continuously through tonight's SnB, and at the end of the night I had less knitting to show for it than I came in with.

I think I may cry.