Holy Disaster Day!

This was a knitting disaster day. What can I say except that nothing seemed to go right. I was trying to finish up the cute little vest, but the stupid pattern doesn't make sense. No matter what I do, it doesn't work out. I think that the person writing it must have been on crack. But someone on Ravelry made it and didn't make any notes referencing crack-using pattern writers, so maybe it was just me. No matter what I tried, the stitches didn't add up, and I couldn't figure out how I was going to attach the front to the back given the way I was supposed to bind off stitches. I hate it when patterns say "AT THE SAME TIME". I tried doing "at the same time" and that didn't work. So I tried doing what it says after it says "at the same time" at the same time, and that didn't work either. Somehow I ended up with a vest with a different sized front and back, and no way to understand why or how it turned out that way.
I just checked out the blog of the only person I can find who knit this blasted pattern, and this is what she says (and I quote)

A wee vest for the chap i work withs wee boy who will be 1 next week, cute dontcha think, looks like something one would play cricket in! Cygnet wool rich 4ply and this pattern
Was a fairly quick knit even if i did have to frog half the front due to unclear pattern, but i muddled thru!

Notice the part about the unclear pattern. Glad I'm not the crack smoking idiot, the pattern writer is. I hope she doesn't come to my blog (Jan McCarthy if you're interested in having a chat with me about this pattern, I'll have you over for coffee!) and see what I've written. Screw it, I hope she does. Pattern writers need to know when their patterns suck.
That brings me to a topic I really want to delve into today. Patterns NEED to be test knit. Not just by the pattern writer, but by a non-biased third (and maybe fourth and fifth) party. And please please please make things clear. None of this "at the same time" shit. If you want me to do a row, and do two things at once, write out the whole row you lazy writer! Sheesh, it probably would have taken Ms. Jan a few more minutes to write the pattern out more accurately than it did for her to slop together the crap she calls a pattern. Maybe I'm not supposed to complain since it was a free pattern but still, one has expectations of accuracy in a published pattern, and even more for one that was published by a well known yarn company **cough cough Classic Elite Yarns cough cough**.
So I pulled the whole thing out and rewound up the yarn and I intend to make a lovely pair of socks with it when I'm no longer so pissed off. That might take a while.
In the mean time, I decided to knit on my toe up socks in the Lisa Souza Lime N Violet. Well, in my flurry of pissed-off-ness, I tore out the needle from the part I'd already done. So I ripped that too, and decided to try a short row toe sock, thinking it might be less boxy. Nope, when I got the whole toe done, it looked basically the same as the Sock.ra.tease one I was doing, and was a lot freaking harder. So I ripped that, and plan to start the Sock.ra.tease one again. But I decided to blog first while the frustration was fresh in my mind.
So any pattern writers out there, please make sure your instructions are clear to even the most basic knitter (which I'm not). None of this "at the same time" shit, and have a few strangers test knit your patterns.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
(PS now what in the heck am I going to make for my friend's new baby boy? Oh, and it has to be from my already purchased stash since I've bought 2 kinds of yarn already to make him something that hasn't turned out.....)