Silly me.  I assumed something and we know what that means.

My iPad cover swatch.  Remember it?

I pinned the felted swatch to the cover on my ironing board to dry so I could use the squares as my measurement.

Great plan.

Those squares are one inch so my swatch would be five inches square.  And I really had to tug to get the width to five inches.

Mr. Aitch’s cover was 48-49 stitches so I thought I would make this one a few stitches bigger since I was doing a two-color design and I had to work within the color pattern.  I cast on 26 stitches for this swatch since I planned on 52 stitches for the width.  Wonderful.  I needed the cover to be about 10 inches wide.  This was going to be a piece of cake.

After felting and measuring the wet swatch, I went on my merry way.  Now with only a few more rows left to knit I’ll be ready to felt in no time.  Then I decided to remeasure the dry swatch one more time.  The swatch is not five inches square.  The swatch is 4.5 inches square and the finished cover just might not be wide enough.  How can this be?  It must have been stretched so much that once it was unpinned, it relaxed.  Relaxed a half inch.  Which translates to one inch on the finished project.

Had I realized this before I cast on, I could have just made it eight stitches wider.  But n-o-o-o.  I had to hurry up and cast on before checking and double checking my swatch.  Length-wise there is no problem.  I can knit a few more repeats.  Width-wise is the issue.

I’m going away next week and really, really, really wanted to have this cover finished for my iPad.

Do I keep going as though nothing is wrong and hope and pray (and tug, and tug, and tug) that it will fit?

Do I pick up some stitches along the sides and make a gusset-type of thing?

What would you do?