The sweater I never thought I’d finish….I had gotten to the point to where I just needed to seam up the sides and the sleeves and add the button bands. I guess that proves how much I dislike doing button bands. :-)

This was my first fair-isle attempt. I actually found that it wasn’t hard to do, but the pattern is fairly simple too.

1/10/09

OK, I finally have this thing seamed. I am going to block before doing the button band.

A cool trick I learned for this one was how to use duplicate stitch (in rev. stockinette) to weave in ends. I even pulled out the ends I had already woven in as I worked on the body of the sweater to redo them this way. Now granted, there are other simpler ways to weave in ends, but my goal for my knitting this year is to learn how to do impeccable finishing. It’s the perfectionist in me, I guess.

This was the first time I knit a sweater this way where all you have to seam are the sleeves and the underarms. LESSON LEARNED: Make sure you reinforce the areas around where you are “dividing off” for the sleeves, or you will end up with loose, wonky stitches at the edges that make your seaming much harder than it should be. And make you say bad words.

1/25/2009

Just need to get buttons to sew on. Knitting Help’s wonderful website taught me to do a one row buttonhole with this video, which I employed for this sweater.

1/29/2009
I found the perfect buttons and JoAnn had two packs left, which ended up being the exact number I needed. Sadly, though, when I got home to sew them on, I realized one of them was cracked to the buttonhole. :’-( . (I was so excited that I was soon going to be changing my status from WIP to FO, too!)

I took them back to JoAnn to see if they had anything else that might suit, but honestly didn’t like anything they had, at least not for the sweater. And if I have spent hours knitting a sweater, I refuse to settle on the buttons.

2/10/2009
I finally found buttons I liked. Buttons are sewn on and ends are all woven in. I am going to give another wash with Eucalen and dry it flat. The button band is a little wonky at the top, but oh well…

I love the 501 yarn-it softened up nicely after washing and blocking and is very nice to knit with-no splitting. I wish it hadn’t been discontinued.