Frustration!!

I've posted another Nostalgia shot rather than try to photograph the tangle I'm currently in. This sweater is an Icelandic Lopi sweater. They are very quick and easy to knit, yet look rather impressive - and they used to be cheap. The local market had a stall that used to feature bin bags full of yarn and crates full of cones left over from the mills - thinking about it now, I wonder how Icelandic wool got into the mix? I used to buy piles of odd balls and make sweaters for everyone, whether they wanted them or not! The one in the photograph was either knitted in Japan, or knitted while on a trip to America. I know that's 2-day stopover in San Francisco in the background of the photo. My American boyfriend took me on a ski trip to Colorado - and we had a day trip to Aspen which was just about the most glamorous place I'd ever been too. For some reason my response to being in a place that had a plane park bigger than the car park was to urgently need to buy wool. We went to a delicious yarn store in Aspen with snow on the roof and fairy lights all down the street - I clearly remember enjoying the American-style service, so different from the UK's grudging sales staff, and I remember buying a pile of Lopi, but after all this time, I can't remember which colour yarn I bought there. I made a Lopi for the BF as well - he really liked it because he was so tall he'd never had a sweater with long sleeves before - the advantage of custom knitting.

Well, that's enough pleasant nostalgia - back to painful reality. I simply cannot get the shaping for the right slope of the last side of Cloud Three. I can't parallel park either. It's the same kind of skill. I cannot do decreases in double rib without clear directions. Something in my head simply won't translate P2tog tbl at end of row for the left slope to what you need to do for the right slope. The pattern simply says: 'reverse shaping for right side'. What do I reverse? Work at the beginning of the row not the end? Is P2 tog the opposite of P2 tog dbl? Or is it K2tog tbl? Or simply K2 tog? I would have thought that I'd tried every available combination over the last couple of days. It's a problem because you have to shape on both sides of the work - so I need to know what you do at the beginning and end of the row for both sides and it's just not working. I admit defeat. I'm going to email Rowan for help and knit lace for a bit instead. Although I can knit the lace now, I still need to be alone in the house so I might start my next project while I'm waiting to hear back from Rowan - Elizabeth Zimmerman's Butterfly in Portuguese knitting - so of course it will be the Portuguese Butterfly.