Final Front Forces Placket Planning

I knocked out the Left Front over the weekend.  I *might* be on a little bit of a tear.  

And while it was drying, I started to play with how to make the front placket.  See, because I decided on a square neck, which will require miters at its inside corners, I've been thinking that I must also miter the outside corners.  Why?, you might well ask.  Umm, because I'm a spaz, and having one sexy mitered inside corner, and one boring picked-up edge right next to it is going to make my teeth itch.  And possibly my hair fall out in clumps.  I know my persnickety nature well enough to predict that this is one of those situations where I just want it how I want it.  So I grabbed my initial swatch and gave the outside miter thing a whirl:

I initially thought that the placement of the top buttonhole adjacent to the miter would be the tricky part.  And I was right.  This one didn't land quite where I wanted it.  But the real problem turned out to be that my M1R and M1L increases on either side of the center st of the miter took too much slack out of the center st, pulling it in.  See how the corner isn't square, and both the top and side edges are slanting?  Since the buttonholes were also too close together, I pulled the whole thing out, trying to be glad that at least I'd tried it in small scale first.

And then I tried again, using different increases.  Which also sucked, so I pulled it out.

On the 4th or 5th try, I realized that I really didn't have to knit placket along the whole edge of the swatch: just the corner would suffice.  "DUH" magazine called to ask me to pose for the November cover.

I gave up in frustration (but not before viciously stretching and pinning the poor thing to the arm of the sofa, hoping it would "block out": Fail.)  The solution came to me in that foggy place between sleep and awake: The center stitch of the outside miter needed more yarn in it so the increases on either side of it wouldn't pull too tight.  So all I had to do was artificially elongate it.  Which I could easily do by wrapping the yarn twice around the needle when making that one stitch (which happens on the WS, just in case the whole thing wasn't fiddly enough).  But it worked:

By elongating the center st when making it (on the WS), when I made the increases on either side of it on the RS, it shortened up to the normal size without pulling in!  Pleased with myself?  Little Bit.  I called "Knitting Show Offs" magazine to ask if they need contributions. 

They're gonna get back to me.  Really.