I never thought it would happen to me.
So I mentioned Bartlett being at Gore Place last weekend. I think I also mentioned that I bought a bunch of sport-weight yarn. (Is 3 pounds enough for a gansey? Let's hope. That's 3 miles of yarn.) And I picked up Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters at Webs. You can probably see where this is going: I felt so virtuous about finishing two socks on Monday that I immediately cast on another sock -- a Coriolis sock.
The book has several tables in the back that are based on the size of the foot and the gauge you're getting with that yarn on those needles. Somehow I remembered getting 8 spi with Bartlett on 2.75mm needles, so I didn't bother swatching. You can probably predict the rest of this story.
I measured my foot. Ten and a half inches around. So I looked up those two numbers, got the magic numbers I needed, and cast on. The toe seemed big; the foot seemed bigger. There was no way it was going to fit snugly. So I checked my gauge -- against the Bartlett socks I knit a couple years ago, not against the sock I was knitting -- and verified that it was, indeed, 8 spi.
Well, obviously, the size of my foot was wrong. I considered my usual socks, in which I cast on 80 stitches at 10 spi and they fit. So completely on instinct I ripped back to where the toe had 72 stitches, and st.arted the foot over again on. It seemed a little loose, but I carried on.
(Astute readers may note that all the gauges in here are measured off long since completed socks, or come from vague memory.)
So I got to the point where I started thinking about the heel turn, and did the back of the envelope math to figure out how much longer I had to knit before turning the heel. At an estimate, it would have been finished about four inches past the back of my foot. There was nothing to do but go get the ruler.
And it turned out that I was getting seven stitches per inch in the Bartlett sport. (And my other socks were closer to nine stitches per inch than 10. The math worked much better that way.)
It is a testament to the quality of the Bartlett yarn that it ripped out so cleanly. I need to sleep on the question of whether I'm going to cast on the yarn on those needles (with fewer stitches) or on smaller ones (which means actually measuring *gauge). And I'm not sure the pattern works well in the dark yarn I chose: the cable I was putting on the Coriolis band was subtle, possibly too subtle, and would work better in a lighter colored yarn.
It's not that gauge didn't work - it's that gauge only works if you aren't in denial.
