Why can't patterns say what they mean?

The blue crochet cardigan is finally here. I wish I could model it but alarmingly as huge as it looks in the photos I look like as snake before it's shed it's too small skin. Let's hope by the summer I will be back to the size I was when I started crocheting it 5 yrs ago! It is a Hayfield pattern 4065 but as I got the pattern from the Red Cross charity shop I presume it is well out of date by now. The wool is nothing special just a Teddy DK which again is probably extinct by now.

I haven't seen Julie so far so no photos of the shawl in wear yet. I still hope that she will call in later today and I can take the photos.

I decided to start a quite plain bolero jacket from my Casual to Classic book by Annie's attic. I started with the sleeve (don't ask my why I just decided to start there) and immediately ran into trouble. What can be hard about a plain treble (sorry I must learn to call it a double crochet - yeah in my dreams!) sleeve. Well I though that the increases were a bit strange for a sleeve and then realized after a while that the sleeve must be worked top down. There is nothing on the pattern to indicate this nor are there any diagrams. My pet peeve with this pattern is not that. I fail to see why a pattern that goes from 28" to 62" also has to add the X small, small, medium and so on to the rows. I am quite capable of working out what size I am (or size that I should be in the case of the blue cardigan) without being told that I am also X large for example. Counting along 9 sizes (given in inches and sizes) per row is bad enough but they say repeat row * to ** twice then repeat rows * to ** once when all they needed to say was decrease every 6th row until you have x number of stitches and have done y number of rows. Why do patterns need to include all this excess gubbidge? They make them far harder to follow in my mind. All I want to know is how many chain I start with. how often I increase or decrease and how many sts I should end up with. UK designers - where are you? I have never unravelled so much in my life since I started crocheting from US books.

Please don't get me started on the word frogging! It was amusing when I first heard it (yeah the noise a frog makes - rippit) but the joke is over and passe now and I find it irritating. It's a bit like that stupid frog ring tone that everyone had on their phone years ago. I am English and speak my own language. I do not want to become Americanized and lose my National identity, my spelling or words. I get so annoyed sometimes with Ravelry when I am corrected on forums for saying grey instead of gray and colour instead of their color. Plus who the hell owns a pocket book in the UK? A pocket book to me is something that a policeman writes in - a purse is what we keep our money in - a purse is not a handbag. Suspenders are sexy ladies lingerie items and not old man's braces. I don't wear a garter belt - garters are elastic bands that I used to hold my socks up when I was a kid. A stick shift is something a child would say when it doesn't know the right word for a gear lever. I could go on but at the risk of alienating any US readers that I might have. How can we allegedly speak the same language and yet have so many altered words? No wonder the patterns are hard to follow!