There an old carpenter's saying "Measure twice, cut once". The same concept applies to knitting. When knitting a fitted item such as a sweater or a vest one must knit a gauge swatch to see how many stitches and rows per inch they get with the needle/yarn combination.

I did this with the alpaca vest I have been knitting and came up with 6 stitches/inch for each row/round. I did the math and cast on the stitches that would be needed to knit it in the desired size with that gauge.

At just short of the half way point in the thing I noticed that I was going to run out of yarn before the thing was finished. According to my math that shouldn't happen. I did some checking and decided to secure the thing on the cable and try it on for size. It was way too big. It would probably have fit a small elephant or maybe a Shetland pony, but it was certainly too big for me.

I measured the gauge I was knitting in the thing and found my problem. While I had knit the swatch at 6 stitches/inch I was knitting the vest at 5 stitches/inch. This may not sound like much but it amounts to almost 50 extra stitches in each row/round and almost 10 extra inches in the overall diameter of the thing.

No wonder I was running out of yarn so soon!

I had been thinking for a while that it seemed awefully large, but as it's my first sweater type item I figured it was just my imagination. I suppose I should have tried it on long before I had reached that point. Lesson learned. From now on I will double checck the gauge early on in the project.

Last night I frogged the thing back to a pile of yarn, wound it all back into a ball, did the math again, and cast on what should be the correct number of stitches for the size I actually want to knit.

Oh well, at least the alpaca yarn is nice and soft and enjoyable to work with. Ya know what they say, experience is what ya get when ya didn't get what ya wanted.