mariah update

January 26th, 2005

Mariah. Sweet, pretty Mariah. She was almost done. I did alll the knitting parts. And then I proceeded to seam them up. A few observations:

The yoke was HUGE. By nature yokes are big. When you think about it, two sleeves+back+two front panels=a LOT of knitting. So it took awhile for the shoulder shaping and hood to be knit.

Also hoods are deceivingly large. They look all cute and not so big when hanging off your sweater, but when you think about how much of the hood is just overlapping on itself you can begin to see exactly how large those things are.

I learned to keep my swatch. By the time my sweater was done I was knitting nowhere near the perfect gauge that I had originally knit.

Find out what the length of sleeves in directions really means. My arms are small. After seaming the sweater up the sleeves were about four inches long. This is fine for clothes that you buy in stores but when we’re talking about something that I took the time to knit myself… I just want it to be perfect. I don’t want to lose any sleeve detail and I don’t want to be rolling any part of my knitting so that it isn’t hanging off me.

So in the end I ripped. I knit new swatches. I changed needle sizes (I’m now using 5s instead of 7s.) I am totally redoing the sleeves. The back and front pieces are on stitch holders, but if they look really bad with the new gauge I may end up redoing those as well. I’m not sure if I started with the loose knitting at the yoke or before.

I am taking a break from this project.