Just a quickie

What a crazy week! It's not going to get better until 12:30 pm Friday. Then I get only a few hours of respite before the parents come to town for the weekend. Arghh!! No rest for the weary this weekend.

However, I can take comfort in knowing that when I get home everynight this week I can spend time working on Polka Purl Dots from the Spring issue of Interweave. It didn't start out as my refuge from insanity. That darn cast on direction took an entire day to figure out. Very poorly written is all I have to say!!! They tell you to do the tubular cast on, so you go to the instruction page, and it says cast on this certain way then knit, wyif slip 1, knit, etc. for the next few rows, so one can only assume that all these rows is the tubular cast on method. After several attemps, some of which was with all 210 stitches, did I figure out what it really meant. What the pattern direction should really say is cast on using the tubular method knitting row 1 only. It's been smooth sailing after that. I'm substituting the Butterfly Super 10 with Cotton Fleece. Wow, Cotton Fleece is great! I think it would also be an excellent sub for Rowan Cotton Glace or Wool/Cotton.

Also, I'm finishing up the current Phildar freebie, you know, the raglan tank top. Ran across some words I couldn't figure out. At first, I asked my multilingual friend what the meaning of surjet was and she didn't know. Then I went to this translator to look it up, and there it was.

Has anyone attempted to work on any of these Drops patterns? Is it as easy to translate and understand as the Phildar ones?