Saturday, January 7, 2017

And then there were three...

Last time I checked in on my green sweater it had become two green sweaters. If you paid attention to the title of the post (or read my last one), you probably know where I'm going with this.




Yep. A third sweater. My knitting group is worried about me. I am just amazed that I two skeins of still-untouched yarn-- way to go, Bartlett yardage! So I don't see the multiple sweaters-in-progress as a problem... yet.

How I got to this point is mildly interesting if you're a top-down raglan sweater fan. The first sweater I had knitted to about waist length when I started to doubt if I was going to like the fit. When I started the second sweater, I wanted to keep the same yoke depth, neck shaping, and sleeve circumference but end up with more body stitches-- to do this I cast on fewer stitches for the sleeves and changed my rate of increasing for the body and sleeves. I failed to account for how this would change the fit of the neckline, and I didn't figure it out until I had re-knitted the neck ribbing on the second sweater for the fifth (or sixth, I lost count) time. I was trying to get my 1x1 ribbing to look better-- and in this pursuit I fell down a knitting rabbit-hole that I will probably have to write more about in a future post-- and when I finally got something close to what I wanted it still didn't fit the same because I had fewer stitches around the neck than I did for the first sweater.

Still following? God bless/help you. At this point I could have unravelled that second yoke and started over with the same number of neck stitches as the first, with different rates of increasing for the sleeves and body. BUT-- I wasn't sure that I wanted extra room in the neck, and I had enough yarn, AND I was already in an empirical mindset. A third yoke with the EXACT same neckline as the first, but with the same number of body stitches as the second, was inevitable. Sometimes I have to let the "what if?" part of my brain take the rest of me along for the ride.

Now I can choose between neckline #2 or neckline #3 (which is the same as #1) and then decide whether I want more or less room in the chest. Given my decision-making track record I might have this one done in time for next winter!

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