Happily, I wasn’t alone in thinking Chicory would be good on a bigger girl. Several knitters on Ravelry quickly grabbed the worsted weight and cast on, too. But one of them soon posted that she couldn’t get her left front edge to look neat. The i-cord stitches just wouldn’t tighten up. I knew immediately why; I’d called for slipping the first three stitches with the yarn in front and then knitting. Because the yarn has to travel from the front of the work and then back between the needles to prepare for a knit stitch, it’s necessarily going to leave a little slack. This hadn’t bothered me in the tiny version, but I looked more carefully at my Chicory Grande.

My edge was rolling up just fine; it’s maybe a tad looser than on the other side, but still serviceable. But in the bottom half of the photo you can spot what made me twitch a little: an extra blip of yarn aslant between the edge stitches and the garter next door. In the smaller scale and darker, variegated yarn I used for the first Chicory, it hid in the garter stitch. But here it’s annoying, like a mosquito somewhere in the room when you’re trying to go to sleep. So I fixed it… see how the blip disappears after the first six ridges? That’s because I changed techniques. The pattern now calls for you to slip the last three stitches of every row (with yarn held to the WS) and purl the first three on WS rows. Done and dusted. It’s a tiny detail, really, but as a designer I’m always a bit embarrassed when I find I’ve been sloppy. This is why I hire test knitters to tackle every size of my paid patterns—another knitter, carrying the yarn with a different hold or a different tension, substituting materials, surely would have noticed this trouble brewing and I’ve have made the correction before publishing. Ultimately I want the free patterns to be as perfect, so I’m deeply grateful for field notes from others.

This is all by way of saying you should download the new version of the pattern—make sure your copy is named Chicory1.2—either here on the Free Patterns page or on Ravelry so you can get clean results.

I’m almost done with the body and there’s loads of wool left; stay tuned for sleeves!