So. Current project: the Harvest Pullover. Raglan. A lot of stockinette. Brown stockinette. But then there were the sleeves. The pretty, pretty sleeves, which were the whole reason I wanted to make this sweater to begin with.
Ok. So, start knitting. DID A SWATCH. GOT GAUGE. Proceed to begin the sweater. Made it to the first sleeve. Knit, knit, decreased, lathered, rinsed, repeated. Finally -- FINALLY -- got to the first pretty, pretty colored section. Did the red. Did the orange. Did the yellow. Got into the green and then...hm...:::checked instructions:::...realized I misread and had to rip back 30 rows of sleeve. Recovered from the setback, continued on in the correct manner, and ended up with a lovely, lovely sleeve, as seen above.
With only one sleeve and the bottom of the sweater still on circs, it wasn't possible to try the thing on (yes, too lazy to put the sweater on waste yarn at this point), so I slipped my arm in the sleeve to model it. See how the cuff hits right below the wrist? Yes. This is how I was hoping it would actually fit once finished.
Fast forward a couple days, add the second sleeve and then energy to try the thing on the correct way. Hm. Okaaaay. Sleeves come down to my fingertips. Not good. But! The neckline was not yet finished, and that, I surmised, would right this wrong and pull everything up to where it should be.
Took the sweater with me to work today and opted to finish up the neck before finishing the rest of the body of the sweater, just because I couldn't shake this uneasy feeling about the length of those sleeves. Lo and behold...the crew neck as it is now only pulled the sleeves up to about mid-finger length. Bonnie -- my boss and knitting extraordinare -- went on to outline my various options for fixing this. One choice: rip back the sleeves, rip out two inches of brown and reknit the color work. So not going to happen. Seriously. I could probably do it in my sleep at this point, having the color pattern memorized as I do, but there is just no way in hell or any other afterlife location I'm redoing those sleeves. No. Way.
The most palatable option she offered me was to CUT the sleeves just above the colored sections -- yes, CUT, as in SNIP SNIP -- unravel the brown the two unwanted inches and then graft the two sections together, which should result in it looking like nothing untoward had ever happened. This sounds like a much happier choice to me. I like grafting. I like not reknitting 180 rows of sleeve. The thought of the cutting aspect? Has me a little freaked. Ok, a lot freaked. But, it's the best option I've got, and Bonnie said I could bring it in and do it under her supervision, LOL, so that's probably what I'll do.
Oh, and the swatch? That told me I was getting gauge? It lied. And I know why it lied. Because I knit my swatch straight, which means I threw, whereas the sweater is being knit in the round, which means I'm knitting continental. (Why do I knit English when I knit straight and continental when I knit in the round? I don't always, but I do when I'm doing mind-numbing amounts of stockinette...it goes faster. And I suck at purling continental, so that's why I don't knit that way if I'm doing more complicated stitch pattern work in the round.) My gauge is always looser when I knit continental. I KNOW this. I just totally forgot this. And so I suffer the consequences. :::sigh:::
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