I'm pretty happy with this

Well, I left off yesterday with my alpaca sweater stretched out arms akimbo with a promise that I would do the big reveal today Today the shackles are off and its a wonder of smooshy loveliness.

But it did not look so fabulous when I first cast off and tacked it together.  In fact the sleeve head was hopelessly too long and narrow.  How could that happen?  Well, I did follow the pattern, almost, but after the shaping (for the underarm bit) the instructions said to knit 7 rows, that seemed far to little so I added some more. Disaster! back to the drawing board

I needed more width across the middle of the sleeve head and less fullness at the crown.  Luckily there is lots of negative ease in this design so it has been very forgiving.  My modifications would not work on something more structured but they did here.  Fistly I got out my tape measure and calculator and worked out my tension to the half stitch.  Then I measures the exact circumference of my armhole and divided my rough chart into three sections A,B and C

A - The underarm. To get the extra width I cut out a lot of the shaping in the underarms and kept it to casting off 3 stitches at the beginning of the next 2 rows and  1 each end of the following 3 alternate rows.  I noted how long the edge would be to this point.  

C - The Crown. I decided to work all the rest of the decreases in the crown part until 18 stitches remained before casting off and calculated how long that would be.  

B- The middle section was calculated last, once I knew how many inches I needed to add to A and C to equal my armhole circumference I worked out the number of rows I needed to work straight.

I planned all this on paper and put in an afterthought lifeline before I ripped out the top section of both sleeves. 

You can see how uneven it all looked still, but blocking is miraculous!

 A lovely tidy edging

And a big sweeping swooshey neckline

As I mentioned before I have in mind a bright colour affection shawl to wear with my new sweater but for now blight does nicely.

The sun has come out At Last, but not too warm for a sweater yet.

xx

c

Knitty dilemma

Do you ever find it hard to decide whether a Finished Object is a triumph or a disaster?  I might have mentioned slouchy hats made from sparkly yarn last week; about all the cooing over the idea at knitting group and the rushing out to get yarn.  Even after some mods (tighter here, bigger there....) the two hats took me just two evenings to make.  The yarn is certainly very pretty

The sparkly bits (silver sequins) pop out just a little, the colours are perfect and yarn (despite my prejudice against synthetic fibre) is soft with just the right amount of fluffiness.  BUT it was a bit of a different story when I showed them to Dear Daughters 1&2. There were hoots of derision and gales of laughter.

DD1 said they reminded her of hats worn to cover hair loss, worse DD2 said they were like something Nora Batty would wear.  The little Model put one on her daddy's head and the other on Little Brother.  LB loved playing peek a boo, the hat came down to his shoulders.

Perhaps I need a rethink...  But I have so much to do.  There is this quilt

Well not actually this quilt.  This is the prototype/pattern for the main event, and is only 50cm square, I wanted to see how piece the colours together and whether they went with the sample piece of wall paper (OK I think)

The main event has reached this stage

So you can see I am a bit pressed for time but the question is what to do with the hats?  They were destined for non-knitting-friends.  Now I know that even if they would never dream of actually wearing the item, knitters would look at the soul of the FO.  I'm not saying that NKF's don't have soul - they do, in buckets but knitters can go a bit off piste about some things that NKs find it hard to grasp. 

For instance all knitters are going to understand AlliDecks need to travel halfway across the globe with two spinning wheels and more than one packing case of yarn.  Or the raptures we can go into when there is the mention of Brittany needles or Yarn from Blue Faced Leicester Sheep but we don't expect others to do the same.  I might have raised the bar a little too high last year with cashmere gloves - but what do you think?  Give or keep as dog walking hats? (if I ever have a dog!)

xx

C