What's wrong with this picture?!

[Andrea Dener]

Hi there, I am hoping you can help me help a friend with a kooky crochet situation!

 

She sent me the attached picture, along with this note:

 

"I've been doing a shell stitch and have not changed anything. Only the last four or five rows are with new yarn. For some reason, the emphasis switched from looking one way on one side and another on the other side (predominantly red or white) to the other way. I'm too deep into it to rip it out now, but I just wonder what I did wrong."

 

Can anyone figure out what she did that resulted in the pattern reversed?

 

Many thanks!!

[magiccrochetfan]

welcome to the ville!

 

i imagine when she started with the new yarn, she did not turn the work to work in the correct direction.  the shells are bowed  a little bit and they protrude more to one side than the other.  i think they bow toward the "wrong" side of the row. 

 

she also seems to have a few extra shells in places but that doesn't affect the appearance of changing color dominance.  

[Granny Square]

I agree.  If you look carefully (especially at taller stitches like DC), you can easily tell the front (the side facing you as you make the stitch) from the back.  On the back side, the stitch bottoms stick out (ahem), and the front is smoother.  

 

Because of the backside stitch bottom, er, appearance, when you make a shell stitch by turning each row, in 2 colors, there is one side that always has the bottoms facing you, and the bottom facing shells will look a little bigger.  On the top of the pic, the white bottoms are facing the camera, on the bottom of the pic it's the red ones.

 

Unless the pattern was supposed to be increased in certain (rather odd) spots, I'm afraid an error was made right at the beginning (in the second row), and also in the first row after the white bottoms start showing.  If this is a gift...it's really obvious with the 2 colors, and if it were me, I'd rip back to the first row (sorry!)

[Granny Square]

Meant to add - blue arrows pointing to apparent errors - the bottom one looks like a shell was added, the top one looks like a shell was removed (the same color shell should stack over each other in columns--you can see at the bottom, white shells appear over the red one in the first row, and at the top, red ones start appearing over a white one right after the direction flip.