This is my reward for being fearless?

I have been planing to make the Sweet Tea tank from Everyday Crochet by Doris Chan for a long time. I bought the yarn about a year ago, after receiving the book for Christmas. I felt it would make a good first adult sized garment project as it has no seaming and no sleeves. But, as I had never tried to make anything that required a lot of shaping and a strict adherence to gauge, I was hesitant to start in on it.

In the interest of being a more fearless crocheter, I made a New Year's resolution to actually make this garment. So, yesterday afternoon I decided that I would start it. No time like the present, right?

The basic idea for this tank is you start at the top and make the top of the front of the garment and then the top of the back. Next, you join them together with bits in between for the underarms and then work the rest of the body in the round. After that is done you make the straps and voila! tank top.

I knew that getting gauge would be very important, so I swatched and swatched and swatched again until I was satisfied that I had in fact found the right hook to get gauge with the yarn I have. So far so good. Next, I started with the top front (or back they are both the same). I got the base rows down and started working the pattern rows. I was happily working repeats of pattern rows 1 and 2 to start with, then I got to the part where I needed to work repeats of pattern rows 3 and 4. This is when I realized I had a problem. I was thinking that pattern rows 1 and 2 were work even rows and pattern rows 3 and 4 were increase rows and in fact it was the other way around. I had not read the instructions carefully enough before starting.

I was kicking myself as I ripped back to the base rows because I follow protocols for a living and I should have freaking known better!

Fine. I redid the piece doing the increase and work even rows in the right places. I made a second identical piece for the back of the tank top. I proceeded to do the first round where the two pieces are joined together and the underarms are made.

Everything was going well and I imagined myself flying through this thing and having a lovely piece to wear from my first foray into adult sweaters.

Somewhere in the middle of the second round it occurred to me that the tank was looking a bit big, so I put it on and hold it up about where it will sit once the straps are on. It was not just a bit big, it was HUGE. *^%#!

I laid the piece out on the bed so I could recheck my gauge. The gauge in your swatch isn't always what you get when you actually go to make an item. I figured with the increases and what-not maybe it was coming out different enough to cause me problems. I was just fine with this theory, not happy but fine. That is until I discovered that, to the best of my ability to determine such things, my gauge was SPOT ON. AHHHHHHH!

I checked to see just how far off I was, because I would need to know in order to try and fix things and the thing was 10 inches too big. 10 inches! How on Earth could I have been 10 inches off if I had gauge? The only thing that prevented me from swearing like a sailor at this point was the fact that I do not actually know how sailors swear. (Maybe the people at the pirate shop can advise me on that.)

This really only left me with two, equally demoralizing, explanations. One, my understanding of what was meant by the gauge guidelines was so far off as to have put me in the next state or two, there is a serious warp in the space-time continuum in my apartment that I was previously unaware of.

I am using a different yarn than the one in the book. However, it is the same weight yarn and has at least some fiber content in common. Even if the fiber content were completely different I still don't see how that could be responsible for the item being 25% larger than expected with gauge having been achieved.

The project is now sitting off to one side waiting for me to calm down enough to rip it out and figure out where in the heck I went wrong.