Hello everyone, hope you've all had an enjoyable Sunday. It turns out I have not been completely forthcoming: I have a TRUE first sweater that came before the blue mesh sweater and my current Off Grid sweater. It's a modular sweater whose pattern I got from Ann Budd's "The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns". At some point during the sleeve cap shaping, I grew very frustrated and decided to give up on it. When I started the Off Grid sweater, I decided to use the copious amount of leftover black yarn from that project for this one. Then at some point this week, I ran out of that black yarn. Today while preparing for the library stitch club, I decided I would rip the striped sweater out and harvest the black yarn from it in order to finish the new one. However, once I pulled it out of storage, I realized the striped sweater was practically done! I had already finished the back and front panels, sewn them together, knit the collar, and the sleeves were extremely close to completion.
The image above is from when I was working on the front panel. When I was going through my old pictures to find some process photos, I realized I gave up on this sweater almost exactly a year ago. What a coincidence. In any case, I found that I didn't have the heart to undo all this work and decided that my stitch club project would be to try and finish it. There were a lot of issues however...
When I started the Off Grid sweater, I needed the same needles I was using for this one. I unceremoniously pulled the needles out without any attempt to hold the stitches. Luckily one sleeve didn't drop any stitches, while the other had only dropped a few. What's more is that one sleeve was halfway through a row and since I had not taken good notes when I was making this sweater, I couldn't figure out how to finish the row until I figured out where I was in the pattern. It took a lot of counting and a lot of math to finally find my place. Once that was done, another problem emerged: One sleeve had 42 stitches while the other had 43. 42 was the correct number, so I clearly had forgotten a decrease somewhere along the way. "Easy enough," I thought, "I'll just bind off one more than needed in the next row and be on my way. My own little secret." However, once I got to the library, I realized my problems went a little further than that. 42 count sleeve was somehow 2 rows ahead of 43 count sleeve! It was then that I realized that this was probably why I gave up: I was knitting these sleeves two-at-a-time and sometimes would get confused at which sleeve was next. I had missed a "decrease on front side" row on 43 count sleeve, so I did that, then knit on the wrong side to get back to both sleeves facing the right side on my needles. This added two rows and completely fixed the problem.
I'm embarrassed to admit that both sleeves were quickly completed in just under two hours. I even started sewing the whole thing together before the meet-up ended. I feel a bit like I want to shake myself from a year ago for not problem solving and finishing the sweater, but I'm simply glad it's getting done now. The only thing is...I still dont have that black yarn to finish the Off Grid sweater with!
Have a great week everyone.