7-13-2009

Finished the first sleeve of Lucky 13 at SnB yesterday.

Now to seam it up and see if it’s OK before I get too far on the second one.

7-14-2009

After seaming the black blob of a sleeve and setting it in the cardigan, I had to admit that it really is just a big black blob. The sleeve is much too large and baggy.

And I’ve no one to blame but myself.

I knew from the schematics that the sleeve width was larger than I’d usually knit for a fitted sweater. And I knew that although my gauge was correct as knitted, that the yarn would grow when washed. I did knit the sleeve with one less decrease, though two stitches didn’t exactly make much difference. (Yes, I knew that too.)

But I didn’t want to bother to recalculate the sleeve cap. I did consider picking up stitches around the armscye and knitting the sleeve downward, but again, I’d have to take the time to figure out how many stitches to pick up.

I rationalized my madness by deciding that a little more ease would be fine. I didn’t need to have them be skin-tight. Plus, I didn’t think the sleeve looked baggy in most of the finished projects on Ravelry, as long as the sweater itself was not knitted with a lot of positive ease. So what if the sleeves were a bit loose – how bad could it be?

Heh. I found out.

It’s not a great look to have 3″ of positive ease in the sleeves, when the rest of the sweater is fitted. If it were just the width around the biceps, it wouldn’t be too bad. But the entire sleeve cap is too wide, and it really looks like I’ve stuffed a large sleeve into a small armscye.

Well, of course, now I not only have to spend the time to recalculate the sleeve cap, but I have to reknit the entire sleeve. Not to mention that I had nearly a third of the second sleeve knitted already – all the way through all of the increases.

So I guess I’ll be joining Margene and Claudia in the “how many times does a knitter need to learn the same lesson” corner of the room.

If I hadn’t already gotten so much of the second sleeve done, I’d probably be tempted to knit the sleeves top-down. But even with ripping out a few inches to eliminate the unnecessary increases, there’s still quite a bit done already. I guess I’ll just finish that one up following my new calculations and see how it fits.

The bright spot is that I had more than enough yarn, so I can probably (hopefully) just finish up the sweater without frogging the Black Blob of Denial (TM). I’d rather not have to reuse superwash wool that’s already been washed – I’m afraid the gauge would be unpredictably different from the rest of the sweater. If I do need to reuse it, I’d rather use it for the buttonbands.

7-16-2009

Color me cranky.

I’ll tell you upfront, this story does not have a happy ending.

I was in the home stretch on my Basic Black cardigan… the newly reknitted third sleeve was finished and ready to be sewn in. I finished the left half of the buttonband, and the sweater was looking really good.

I’d been hoping that I’d have enough yarn from the extra skeins to finish the sweater without having to reuse yarn from the Black Blob of Denial (TM) sleeve. But I ran out of yarn with 2 rows of the right side buttonband to go.

Well, things could be worse. (And unfortunately, they were. But I get ahead of myself.)

I figured I’d rip out the bad sleeve, wind the yarn into hanks, and wash it for reknitting. I’d ripped about 2/3 of the sleeve when my husband came in and asked me what I was doing. As I explained, it hit me.

Have you figured out where this is heading yet?

It wasn’t the bad sleeve I was ripping out. It was my third, perfect sleeve.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Well, at that point, there wasn’t much to do except finish ripping out the entire sleeve. I figured if I didn’t, I’d probably end up with an obvious line where I restarted with the reclaimed yarn. Then, of course, I had to rip out the bad sleeve as well.

So, the yarn has been ripped, soaked, and is hanging to dry.

Now I’m left with a problem. How different will the FOURTH sleeve be if I’m using reclaimed superwash yarn? I know the obvious answer is to do a gauge swatch. But those don’t always tell the truth anyway. And by the time I did a large enough swatch to really be useful, I’d have a big chunk of the sleeve knitted.

I guess I shouldn’t have tempted fate by calling my sweater “Lucky Thirteen”.

7-20-2009

I think I jinxed this one by optimistically (arrogantly?) calling it “Lucky Thirteen”. But after much trauma with the sleeves, and knitting four of them, I finally finished and am very happy with the outcome. So I guess it ended up being lucky after all.

This pattern really lives up to its name – it’s a perfect basic cardigan, and a well-written pattern to boot.

I can certainly see more of these in my future, in other colors.

Modifications:

Knit the ribbing at the hem and cuffs on the same size needle – only used the smaller needle for the buttonbands.
Recalculated the sleeves to adjust for my gauge, and also because I wanted slightly slimmer sleeves than as specified by the pattern.
Also to adjust for my gauge difference, I did an extra set of decreases immediately above the ribbing.