Category: project – Rage Management

Well I have been making great progress on Rage Management.  I finished the body and one sleeve and have started the second sleeve.  Or, more exactly I thought I had finished the body.

I was pinning it to the blocking board today, oh so proud of myself for being almost finished with a sweater and looking forward to starting the next one.  I even thought I could give myself a little bit of a treat and wind up the yarn for the next project tonight.

But then, I realized that something was amiss.  In fact there is something terribly wrong with this sweater, wrong enough that it was quite obvious even through my self-congratulatory fog.  It was obvious even though my mental faculties are somewhat crippled by a head cold and a two-day old sinus headache. 

If you haven't noticed yet, it will be quite obvious in the next photo:

Notice the lovely garter ridges made by the pattern stitches on the back?  Look at how plain the front appears in comparison.  I was supposed to do the same pattern stitches and continue the garter ridges. 

Somehow I forgot.

It is not that it is not that much knitting.  The pieces are really quite small, it is more that I would have rather not made such a silly mistake, and then, I would have rather realized the extent of my error before I washed and blocked the sweater.  I see that it really does help to pay attention to what one is doing.

Bummer.

Well, I have already started the last sleeve and there are no garter ridges on the sleeves.  Besides the pieces have to dry now.

I had a bit of car-knitting time this weekend as we drove down to New Jersey to do a little shopping.  I have done most of the driving on longer trips lately so I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy just sitting in the car, watching the scenery go by, chatting and knitting. 

As a result I finished the back of Rage Management:

For the most part I really like the way this is turning out.

I am not fond of the rolled hem at the bottom.  Oh I know it is unblocked and unfinished now, but I find rolled hems are often somehow uneven and annoying.  I  "should" have thought about this before I started knitting, but now I am almost glad I didn't.  I can see that the rolled hem echoes the garter ridges at the top of the sweater and is therefore a nice design feature.  But I find it difficult to get rolled hems to lie just so and they always seem to be curling up or down or just looking unfinished, no matter what I do to anchor them in place. 

I started the front and I intentionally knit it the same way, so at the moment it rolls.  But I think when I am done I am going to unravel the bottom of both the front and back pieces and use the same pattern stitch that makes the ridged pattern at the top, knitting down from the body of the sweater, to finish the hem. 

At this point I think I will modify it slightly, making the final two or three rows seed stitch instead of stockinette, to combat that tendency to roll, but the actual technique will probably not be decided until I a actually knitting.

If had started the sweater differently, or changed the hem pattern before I started, I don't think this solution would have occurred to me.  Sometimes mistakes seem to lead to the best outcomes.

I apparently worry too much. 

The sweater is coming along just fine.  My gauge is consistent and right on target.  It just looks bigger slipping along on those circular needles that I tend to use.  I should know this by now.

The actual kntited fabric has a good bit more stretch than this piece of fleece and I don't think the fit will be a problem.  I did rewrite the instructions for the front of the pattern to add that extra inch on the right side, which makes the center front opening appear balanced on my body.  Any other tightness should be accommodated by the stretch of the sweater.  The sleeves also fit perfect.y.  I did increase the depth of the armhole in the front of the sweater by half an inch, but I did not change the sleeve shaping, easing that extra half inch around the front pulls the excess in around the sleeves, compensating for some of the forward roll of my shoulders. 

The fleece looks pretty good now.  I am happy I did this.  I have a good idea of how this will look on and I think the process of making a rough muslin like this is good when I am not sure about the fit of the sweater.  Perhaps sometimes I worry too much, such as in the case of this sweater, but I would still rather spend an hour or so at the beginning of the project working out the details than spend many hours knitting only to rip later.

Now I can move on to other things.

It is time for a new knitting project:

This pattern was purchased as a kit from L'Atelier yarns in Redondo Beach, CA in October 2007. The yarn is Highlander  from Alpaca With A Twist in color Dark Thistle. 

I wanted to start this so that I could have it to knit on the train to NYC on Friday night, although I was actually torn between whether I should knit or read, as I am really wrapped up in my current book at the moment. 

I really like the look of this sweater in the drawing, but I don't look at all like the illustration and I have some concerns about how this sweater will look on my own curvier body.  I don't want to spend a lot of time knitting it only to discover that it is a disaster.  So I had an idea, not an original idea, I am sure I read about this somewhere but I don't recall where at the moment.

I went to my local JoAnn Fabrics and picked up some plain simple cheap fleece — whatever was on sale.

Then, using the pattern directions as a guide, and drawing directly on the fleece with a marker, I drew the shapes of the sweater pieces directly onto the fleece and cut them out.

Then I stitched them up quicky with my machine.  I used 1/4" seams.  I did not add a seam allowance to this pattern because the sweater is knit at 4 stitches to the inch with 1 stitch at each side as a selvedge stitch, which is the equivalent of a 1/4" seam.  If the seam had been much smaller I would have added a seam allowance to make it easier to sew.

Here is the result, without the sleeves:

Drawing the pattern on the fleece actually took longer than stitching up the pieces.  The pattern calls for 3 inches to be taken up at the upper back below the armhole openings.  In the pattern the decreases are spread evenly across the width of the sweater but I just took 3 tucks, which are actually kind of nice looking.  It is not exactly the pattern, but it gets the basic fitting issues across.

This pattern is not written so that the back and front are the same size.   In my sample, the back fits pretty well, as far as I can determine without the sleeves, but the front is too small, as you can see from this photo:

Actually, it is not too small through the shoulders, or at the hip, although I could get away with a little extra at the hip.  I think the knitted fabric is actually a little stretchier than this fleece, but not so much that I think it will compensate for this much pulling across the bust. 

It is difficult to see in this photo, and I was working under pretty tight time constraints so this photo will have to suffice, the front is actually much smaller on the right than on the left, and more snug at the right hip than at the left. 

So I need to draft a new front.  I seem to need about another inch at the left bust, and 2 inches on the right, tapering down to 1 additional inch at the right hip with nothing added at the left hip.  The shoulders should probably be left the same.

Once I have done this, I will need to alter the sleeve as the current sleeve draft will not fit the sweater once I am done altering the front pieces.  When I look at the sleeve pattern, as I have drawn it from the directions, I think it was going to need alterations anyway:

I don't think I like the really short, sharply angled sleeve cap, and the sleeve as written is both too narrow and too long for me.

But first, a new front.  And I haven't gotten back to the cutting table yet today.

I did start knitting last night although I spent more time reading than knitting.

I don't yet have enough length on the needles to actually reflect how this is going to hang but at the moment it looks a little big.  It is definitely stretchier than the fleece. So I might not need to add as much to the front as I originally thought.

First I need to knit another couple of inches and see if my gauge is the same as the swatch.  I must be tense when I knit gauge watches because my tension is often tighter than it is when I am actually relaxed and knitting.  Luckily I have the fleece pattern to use for comparison purposes.  Once I compare the knitted piece to the fleece, I will move on with redrafting the front piece, and perhaps ripping and restarting the back.

And so, despite all my good intentions I now have three projects sitting on the cutting table waiting for something to happen before they can progress.