Finished and I love it!

I knit this at a much tighter gauge than the patter suggested (lying swatch!) but since I was nervous about having it be too floaty this might work out better. (I love the look of floaty, but I’m busty, and sometimes floaty really just looks tenty on me. Sigh.)

Mods:
- I did fewer decreases. I decreased four times total, basically following the pattern for those four and then just stopping (rather than spreading them out over the course of the whole piece).

• Because I had more stitches at the top of the back than the pattern said I should have, I had to rework the number of stitches to bind off for the back. To do that, I just counted all my stitches (269) and divided by two, allocating 134 for the front and 135 for the back. From the 135, I subtracted 21 (the stitches in the centre panel) and the divided that number in half so I’d know how many stitches needed to be on each side of the panel to keep it centred. The end result just meant moving my beginning of round marker back one stitch (adding two stitches to the front).

• I did an extra set of decreases on the front for two reasons: 1. My gauge opened up a lot once I started knitting flat, and 2. I had two more stitches because I did fewer decreases on the back.

-I knit my straps on 13 stitches and made them 11 inches (rather than 9.5) and kind of wish I’d made them even slightly longer. The finishing looks really nice, but it snugs things up.

If I were to knit this again (and that seems likely, because it’s gorgeous), I would go up two needle sizes but knit the same size. I would also add two inches to the body and probably another inch to the straps. I would also set my straps closer to the centre panel so they covered my bra straps better.

I also need to find a neater way to join linen. There were a lot of knots in my skeins (well, at least two per skein) and that plus using most of three skeins meant a bunch of ends to join and weave in. The weaving in was fine, but my joining wasn’t as neat as it could have been. Ho hum.