I sent down start to work out the pattern for Swirls. First, I charted the pattern as it was written, to make an octagon. I laid out the yarn overs and the K2Ts and I couldn’t quite figure out how the pattern actually grew. It looked like you did one K2T for every yarn over. However, drawing out the pattern helped me understand what the basic structure of the unit.
Next, I drew out the pattern again, this time working out where I needed to be increasing additional stitches to turn the octagon into a hexagon. Again, I couldn’t figure out where the increases actually came from, because it sure looked like the yarn overs and the K2Ts were matched.
At this point I realized I had read the pattern incorrectly and missed one yarn over. On every increase row, there are 3 yarn overs and two K2T, so the unit grows one stitch at a time.
I kept looking at the picture of the octagons, and although it is small, I could see the design element of the yarn overs and how they lead into the K2T. I realized I needed to be adding more yarn overs, in order to get my 10 additional stitches by the outer edge. The yarn overs needed to align so that they contributed to the design.
I needed to have more yarn overs toward the outside edge rather than more of them at the beginning and then not as many as the outside. That would not look good. You can see some erasing in the early rows where I shifted the increases.
I want to test the 1st 10 or 15 rows. I’ll draw the whole thing up on larger graph paper, so that I can read it in the car. I don’t have time to test and revise extensively before we take off for the weekend. May carry graph paper with me in case what I have sketched out doesn’t work.