The Never Ending Sweater

I have been knitting on my cabled sweater since...well...July, and I've FINALLY finished it last night. I've renamed it the NEVER ENDING SWEATER, because it's taken forever to finsih.

Around the beginning of September, I finally finished the sleeves. About 3/4ths of the way through BOTH sleeves, I knew that I was creating the sleeves MUCH too big, but I continued to press on in the hopes that it'd get better. It didn't. When I tried on the finished sleeve..well, it was about 3 inches too wide.

The finished sleeve was supposed to be 13.5" wide...this was nearly 17. I finally decided to check gauge, and discovered that I was WAAAY off, despite using the same exactly needle that I used to knit the body (which fits perfectly, BTW). Luckily, all of the increases were at the edges of the sleeve, which the Costumer in me said, "We'll just cut off the excess fabric, while the Knitter in me is screaming "OH HELL NO..."

So, after DH helped me check for fit, he pinned the seam line, and I ran it through the sewing machine with a good bit allowance. Then I pinned the sleeve together loosely on the new seam line (using locking stitch markers) and pinned it to the armscye. It fit perfectly so I added unpinned it and ran it again through sewing machine with a zig-zag stitch, used Fabric Tack to ensure there was no additional unraveling, and then cut the excess fabric off.

Yes, you heard that right. I CUT my knitting. Here's the Before & Aftershot.

I figured it this way: if this didn't work, I would have to completely REKNIT both sleeves, which was going to take a Very Long Time. Plus, I still had a ton of yarn left over, so I wasn't too worried about not having enough. I would try with one sleeve and see if it worked. If it didn't, I'd frog the 2nd one and reknit.

Consequently, I attached the armscye and sewed up along the new seam allowance, and it worked perfectly. So, I started on the second sleeve. This saves me a TON of work having to reknit the whole thing.

Now, I was concerned about the shawl collar, which other knitters promised is going to take as long as the whole sweater combined. So, I picked up 400 stitches, knit the shawl collar while adding the button holes. It took about a week to fully finish the shawl collar, because it had short rows along the neckline, but it worked about beautifully.

I even had the appropriate buttons that worked well with it.

The sleeves are a teeny bit long, but can be easily pushed up. And it's got about 2 inches of ease, so I could probably wear this as an outer sweater in the winter. But it's DONE and it's WARM, and I need to take better pictures of me wearing it...when it's not 80 deg F outside.

Oh, and yeah, I started a gauge swatch for a new sweater about 10 minutes after attaching the last button.....

Throw me a Lifeline

(or ...Too many AT THE SAME TIMES...)

Last night, I was working on my Blackberry Cabled Cardigan, which not only features cabling and double moss stitch (for my version), it also has a LOT of the dreaded phrase, "at the same time" .

There's neckline shaping/decreases AND AT THE SAME TIME with bust increases, then neckline decreases AND AT THE SAME TIME armhole shaping, then the knitter moves onto THREE "at the same times" of neckline decreases and AT THE SAME TIME armhole shaping and AT THE SAME TIME shoulder shaping.

It's enough to make a knitter want to grit her teeth and swear... a lot. However, this is where lifelines help, because everytime I hit a milestone where it's long enough to start the AT THE SAME TIME....I throw down a lifeline.

Of course, I almost didn't at one point, when I finished working on the left armhole shaping and was about to start the shoulder shaping, because, I had thought, "NAW, I'm on a roll! I got this!" (But the nagging part of my hindbrain kept arguing until I got out the brown sock weight yarn I normally use for lifelines and threaded it through the stitches on my needle, which took less than a minute.)

Oh, boy am I glad that I did, because about part way through I realized that I had forgotten to continue working on the neckline decreases AT THE SAME TIME as the armhole shaping AND the shoulder shaping WHILE maintaining (quoting the pattern) the "cable ....pat as best as possible throughout neckline shaping".   (You know things are going to get iffy when the pattern designer has to say "as best as possible....")

(Of course, the nagging part of me turned into the smug-I-told-you-so-me....)

Oofda. So I had to rip back, luckily to the lifeline (a mere rows back) and do all of the AT THE SAME times. Here's my lifeline, which you can't see all of because of the purl stitches on the cabling, but it did save me a ton of frustration and annoyance.

But lesson re-learned. A few moments adding a lifeline can save you TONS of heartache later.

Reverting to Paper Patterns

Despite all my work on the various UFOs that had been languishing in my knitting basket, I was jonesing for casting on a sweater. I don't know when I turned into a sweater knitter, as the year before, I was all about knitting socks.

But now, if you look at my finished Ravelry projects, I've finished four sweaters this year, which isn't too bad, all things considering.

And I just started a new sweater, involving cables and double moss stitch. I was dutiful and made a cabled gauge swatch. Normally, I knit loosely and have to go down 2 needle sizes from the recommended needle, but as this involved cables, I tried the recommended US 7. However, I didn't like the resulting fabric too much as I felt it was too dense, so I went up to a US 8 and got gauge.

   

The swatches were washed & blocked, and I started knitting on the sweater. But I had to frog the beginnings of it once over, because I couldn't get the cabling correctly, because the front starts with a partial cable and as you increase stitches, you work the cable pattern. And my poor brain couldn't wrap itself around the concept, nor could I visually see how this was going to work.

I had re-written the pattern to work the sweater as a single piece (instead of having to seam panels), and my Excel spreadsheet was ACCURATE. However, it didn't take into account the visual aspects of the chart (although my iPad displays the chart easily enough.)

I had redid the cabling on both sides...frogged just the cabling...redid the cabling...then eventually frogged back to before the cabling started. sigh.

Then I hit on a simple solution: PAPER

My pattern is digital on my iPad, and my PDF reader has a nifty feature that allows me to highlight notes and some charts, but sometimes you need to have something in front of you that is visceral.

I printed out the cable chart and went through the pattern line-by-line with highlighter and pencil in hand, and marked out where increases happened and where it was the cable pattern for the Left Side. Then I repeated this exercise for the Right Side. Now I can clearly see how the cabling is going to look on the sweater.

Hopefully, this trick will help me get this patterning right.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Using my iPad for reading patterns is awesome. I love it. And I will continue using my iPad. But sometimes, it helps to mark up a paper pattern just for notes. (I'll still be using my excel spreadsheet to refer to as I knit, however.)