This sweater…this sweater…

This sweater has been the bane of my existance/the love of my life for nearly a year now. I think it might be the most beautiful sweater I’ve ever created, and it’s so close to being finished now that I just my cry. The cable is gorgeous, and I have adored working with this yarn. The yardage is incredibly small but it knits up like a dream.

However, this pattern has caused me no end of woe, some through my own errors, some not. There was the moment I realized I had made the front 3 inches shorter than the back (after I had already cast both sides off), the time when I had to remove the sleeve from body after it had already been joined which took the better part of a day and resulted in me accidentally unraveling the front of the sweater, and numerous other incidents. The pattern also suggested that I make the sleeves a certain length, which wound up with them being 2 feet too long. It has taken my 4 attempts to rip them back and get them to be the correct length, in part because the setting in of them makes them a different length than one would expect.

However, this sweater will be finished quite soon. I’ve managed to fix the front (this led to many tears and a few tequila shooters), get the sleeves the correct length, and do all the finishing. The collar is just a bit shorter than I want it to be, so all I have to do is knit a few more rows and it will be DONE!

12/7/08 - Finished! The sweater is done, and I am wearing it! I don’t think I ever want to wear anything else again. It is the warmest, softest, cosiest sweater in the world, and the sleeves are the perfect length. (Not necessarily worth ripping, soaking the yarn, and redoing them 4 times, but still, they’re good now!) I have about 1 ball of yarn left over, which is perfect - there was a point where I thought I’d have 5 or 6, which I found irksome. I am totally in love with this sweater. I need to take photos of it (and all of my in-progress works, life is boring without photos to show them off) and claim ultimate bragging rights but for now - it’s DONE!

I actually got to wear it out in public tonight - it was my niece’s 12th birthday party, so I got to show it off to my sister and her in-laws. Iselin immediately began pawing my sleeve and scrunching it, which made me feel a bit like when the cats come up and begin kneading their paws against me. I think that I’ve converted her to become a Cashsilk fan - not that it’s hard! I love the cable, I love the colour, I love the yarn, I love all of it. This is MY sweater! Tonight, I shall sleep in my full-size, pillow-topped bed, and it will sleep for the first time ever in my mahogany dresser.

Life is grand.

4/19/24 - Update - I have changed the neckline of this sweater. I’ve been slowly going back through all of my WIPs, one by one. Which ones need to be repaired, which ones should be frogged, etc. When I hit this one, I thought, “I hate that turtleneck.” I have always hated turtlenecks. I can’t think what made me decide to actually do this as a turtleneck other than inexperience and being afraid to change the pattern. So this week, I took a whole day to rip back the collar…first a little, then all the way. Once I started ripping, I realized I had picked up too many stitches and done a messy job of it beside. (New knitter mistakes.) It took me hours to pick up the stitches for the collar all over again, but I’m glad I did. Now, I have 40 grams of yarn deleted from the sweater, all ready to become a hat or some such thing, and a low neckline that immediately made me say aloud, “Oh, that is so much better!” as soon as I put it on.