Wednesday, April 6, 2016

WIP Wednesday - When Knitting Attacks

I've had a serious case of When Knitting Attacks this past week. I've been working on a cardigan for my niece, and was almost at the end of the body when I started wondering about the length of the thing. The pockets seemed like they were going to be ridiculously long. Rereading the pattern, I discovered that the meassurements didn't add up right (5"+11" was supposed to equal 17"), and that it was much the same for the other sizes, so wondering what on earth was up, I sent an email to the designer, asking where I'd gone wrong, and hoping I wouldn't have to rip back too far.

Fortunately she replied very promptly. Unfortunately, my error was at the very start of the pattern, 12" back!!! The armhole meassurements were supposed to be taken from the end of the short row shoulder shaping, not from the cast-on edge. Somewhat ambiguous directions in the pattern, so I can understand why I got it wrong, but it's probably one of those things that should have been obvious.

I was not going to rip back 12" (plus 2 pockets), so I decided to take a deep breath and try my hand at sweater surgery... figuring that if it went horribly wrong, I'd just rip back after all, and only be a little worse off, than if I'd ripped back right away. I've only done the left front so far, and am reasonably satisfied with how it went, even if it did take forever. I just hope it won't be too noticeable that once stripe is suddenly 1" longer than the others.
Cardigan pre-surgery. I'll let you know next week (hopefully... unless I start procrastinating something terrible) how the end-result turned out.

While the cardigan was in time-out, I picked my Professor McGonagall blanket back up, and actually managed to finish the colourwork last night! Now I just need to make the border, and I'll be done!
The colourwork is quite uneven in places (especially the stripes by the falling star), but I'm hoping blocking will help with that. It was a relief to finish all the colourwork, that's for sure. At one point I had 5 balls of yarn going at once!

4 comments:

  1. Oh boy - good luck with sweater surgery! :O I haven't been brave enough to try and fix the sweater I messed up when I tried to make a sweater.

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    1. Thanks! I think it'll be alright, it just takes forever :-P

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  2. What beautiful colours on the sweater. I love the blanket too. It is hard to tell how big it is.

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    1. Thank you :)
      Ah yes, I forgot to put something next to it for comparison. It's rather large - I think about 70cm on each side at the moment? I'll have to measure it once it's done.

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