Nemesis: It's Not Just a Word

I'm happily knitting a pair of socks right now.  I love knitting socks.  I've done enough pairs that I understand their construction, and I find them relaxing.

I went to my yarn room and grabbed two skeins of my standby favorite sock yarn, grabbed one of the patterns I'd printed out as possible vacation knitting, and went to it.  Everything was going swimmingly.

I finished the heel and worked through the gusset and was trucking on down the foot when I decided to check out some photos to see if my gusset looked right.  It was a construction I hadn't done before, and I wasn't quite sure if I was following the pattern correctly.  There also had been some problems in the directions that I put down to errors in the pattern itself.  It wasn't a big deal--the instructions just seemed to be off a stitch or so on the heel flap.

Tra-la-la.  Log in to ravelry, check out people's pictures.

Screech.

These heels look nothing like my heel.  Their heels are way, way cooler than the one on my sock.

How can two people have used the same pattern and ended up with completely different heels?  (I prefer to think of it as if it were just me versus some other knitter when in all honesty it was me versus 288 other knitters.)

I looked up the pattern again on knitty.  I looked at what was on the screen.  I looked at what was in my hand.  I looked back at the screen, then back at my hard copy.  Back and forth.  Back and forth.

Kids, these weren't the same instructions.

Well, now I'm pretty sure I've found a glitch in the matrix.

I check the date I printed the pattern.  June 7.  That wasn't very long ago.  There were no indications online that the pattern had been recently changed, and, even if it had, wouldn't some of those 288 people have knit the version I was knitting?

Then I glanced at the top of my printed pattern pages.

One of them said http://knitty.com/ISSUEdf10/PATTnemesis.php and one said http://knitty.com/ISSUEwinter09/PATTpyroclastic.php.

I had picked up pages one and two of Nemesis and pages three and four of Pyroclastic.

I was knitting Frankensocks, and not in a good way.

The key for me in this type of situation is to not think too much about what has happened.  Just pull the needles out and start ripping back.