great news!
The best scholastic news I've found in a long time: it turns out that one of the books assigned for one of my classes is on Audible. That means I can knit and read at the same time--and be doing schoolwork! Yippee! That means this sweater will, I hope, be done in a couple of weeks. I finished the fronts
and I must say, though it is lovely knitting, the whole thing looks a little small. When I put the fronts on top of the back, the back is definitely wider than the two fronts together. For a while I wondered if I had accidentally knit the things with different sized needles, but I figure if I had the size difference would have been much more obvious. All I can guess is that my tension varies, depending on whether I am on vacation or not. It's not all that noticable, and the larger part of the knitting occurs at the bottom of the back, which works out perfectly to cover the posterior of the body. As soon as the right front was done, with all those buttonholes, I started the sleeves.
Have I ever mentioned that I am short? When I buy things off the rack, sleeves are too long by several inches; radically cropped pant hems are full length on me. When I sew something from a pattern, I have to take every "petite-able" shortening trick available, and remember to stay alert to length measurements when knitting unless I want cowls around my wrists. You can imagine my surprise as I was knitting the sleeves and read that the length to starting cap decreases is supposed to be 14.5 inches. When I got to that point, I looked at my sleeve, and compared it to my arm. It came about halfway up the upper arm--nowhere near the armpit. Puzzlement. Well, this would be ok if the body of the sweater were wide; I do have sweaters where the underarm is about this length, and the body is quite loose. But I realize that the sleeve cap has to go all the way to the neck, and has to match the yoke of the body parts, and looking at the length of the body decreases, I didn't see any way that a sleeve cap starting at the middle of my upper arm was going to make it all the way to my neck. Just to check, I pinned the body side seams together and laced the front and back together at the neck at about the distance apart they will be once the sleeve cap is in there. I tried on the resulting contraption and held the sleeve up to it, and I still couldn't see any way 14.5 inches was going to make anything longer than a 3/4 length sleeve. So I kept knitting.
I started the cap decreases around 16 inches and am now maybe almost halfway through the sleeve caps. It will be a dismal chore if I have to rip them all out and do them over, but I truly can't see any surprise elements lurking in the pattern that would make the shorter sleeves work. Still have I have this uncomfortable, niggling feeling that I'm missing something... me? *Lengthen* a pattern? Very, very odd....
Looking good! But I'm concerned about the inaccuracies in the pattern....
Posted by: diana | February 23, 2006 at 09:18 AM
The sweater looks great! As for the sleeve length, maybe the designer had short arms too.
Posted by: Emily | February 23, 2006 at 09:36 AM