Of course it stands to reason that just as it’s really warming up in Cleveland, I cast on for something with chunky wool. Crazy, right? But I’ve been wanting to knit a Sylvi since forever and I know Cleveland - we’ll get at least one more cold snap.

Right now, I only have 7 skeins of this yarn. The colourway has, unfortunately, been discontinued. I’m hoping to get a few more skeins from a fellow Raveler. I figured that I would get started and try to figure out how many I need to purchase - if anyone has some that they’re willing to spare, I will happily buy it from you! I fell in love with this colour as soon as I saw it and just HAD to make my Sylvi with it. Every time I look at it, that old schoolyard chant pops into my head:

Down in the valley where the green grass grows
there sat Hester pretty as a rose
Along came (crush’s name here) and kissed her on the cheek,
how many kisses did she get that week?

I’m planning on making this without a hood. I’m not much of a hood person to start with and I really want the flower design to always be visible.

3/15/10 - Okay, so I ran into some gauge issues. The gauge is supposed to be 12 sts = 4” in seed stitch. I was getting 15 sts per 4”. I was excited at first; I thought, “Oh yay, I’m getting an extra inch in my gauge! I’ll just go down a size!” Yes, math and I are close friends…I cast on for one size down and suddenly realized that I wasn’t gaining an inch, I was losing an inch. (And by “suddenly realized” I mean about 14 rows into the left side panel.) Doh! I kept going up and up in needle size and could not stop getting the 15 sts per inch. This yarn is, to put it quite simply, not bulky enough. However, I took my gauge and did some simple math and now I’m following my own directions. Basically I’m following the increase and decrease directions for the 38” size of this, but I’m casting on a different number of stitches than the pattern calls for. For the front panel, I cast on 60 stitches. It’s working out well so far; I keep measuring and re-measuring it, and I really think it’s working well. I absolutely love how it looks, this colour is just devastatingly gorgeous. Of course, now I’m uber worried about having enough yarn because it’s clearly going to need more yarn than the pattern calls for.

2/22/11 - This project has been fairly troublesome. First, of course, was the gauge issue, so I know I’m going to have to be mindful when it comes to sizing and armholes and such. I made the right front - unfortunately, I think that the button band is all wrong for the buttons that I purchased, so I might have to do that all over again. I did one of the sleeves and I think it looks great. I worked really hard on the back over Thanksgiving and had it up to the armholes - I mean, really far along…that was when I stepped back and looked and realized that there was something wrong with the dye jobs. See, Chunky doesn’t have any dye lots, and this colour is discontinued, so it took me awhile to track down enough skeins. Apparently, one of them was dyed in a totally different way. Instead of looking kettle-dyed and slightly variegated, it’s just a straight pea-soup green with no colour variation at all. And where, you ask, did I use this skein? It was the second one I joined onto the back…so all the way back at row 35. I tried and tried and tried to find a way to fix it without ripping back but I really and truly couldn’t. So I tore back and then abandoned it for awhile out of sheer frustration. Now I’ve picked it up again - I think it’ll work out better because I had to add in extra repeats for the cables anyway since I’m not anywhere near gauge. Probably, since I had gauge issues to start with, I should have started with the back to be sure it was long enough and everything was matching up. Too late…too late…

Anyway, I noticed that this project is about to have been on the needles for a year which I just don’t want. It’s still bitter cold here - I really want it to be finished by the one-year mark. I figure if I can finish the back, it will make it so much easier for me to figure out how to finish and join the other pieces to it.

3/27/11 - I am so close to finishing this. SO CLOSE. It’s looking like I’m going to have to use up every last inch of yarn for it. I re-did the back. I’m 95% happy with it. I wish that I had knit two skeins at a time and gone back and forth with them, the way indie dyed yarn always tells you too. There are a lot of different skeins here and when I look, I can see the difference so clearly from one to the next. But I’ve done that back twice now, and I’m not touching it again. Even the petals for it are all done. That was an exercise in sheer boredom. In fact, two weeks ago, I worked on them for so long, one freakin’ petal at a time, feeling like I was getting nowhere fast because I’d been working on only this for weeks without stop without finishing it the way I wanted to - I finally had to stop and put the sweater in time out. For one whole week, I didn’t touch it once, just worked on socks instead. Do you ever have weeks at a time where you knit and knit and knit and at the end of it still feel like you have nothing to show for it?

Anyway, the back is done, and I just finished the right front panel. I decided to knit it using one kettle-dyed skein and one that looked a little to solid green for my taste - the solid green one was the top of the left panel that was already finished a year ago. I decided to do that because I was down to two skeins of yarn - the evil cursed lime one that had ruined my back in the first place and one nice one. I knew that I would probably need to use the evil one at some point and decided it would just be easier to rip out the part of the front piece that was too solid and blend it into the new front piece, then redo as much of the left front as necessary. I think that I’ll have just enough with the evil skein and the good skein that originally made up the left front to re-do the left front. At least, that’s my hope. I have maybe half to two thirds of the final skein left, and that has to go towards making this thing up, making petals for the cables I decided to put on the right front panel, and a collar on this. I really really really REALLY don’t want to have to order another skein of this yarn, even though there is still one shop that carries it. I’m hoping that I can power through this panel and get it done by the end of the week, then make it up over the weekend and maybe finally get the chance to wear it at the beginning of April. Is it possible? Is it? I have no idea, but god do I hope so. I just want this sweater to be on my body. I’m so tired of every single project that I’m carrying around, especially because none of them get finished. It was my goal this month to finish this sweater, both pairs of socks I have on the needles, my Celtic Cowl, and my mother’s hat. As it is, I think that I’ll only be able to finish one pair of socks and that’s only a slim possibility because I’m pushing so hard on this sweater. I feel like I really owe a huge apology to my mother. I gave her that hummingbird hat 3 months ago and still haven’t fixed it? That makes me feel lousy. I just have so little drive to do it because it was so much work and I just don’t want to make it over again. But I really want her to have the hat and be able to wear it while it’s still a bit nippy…so I’d better get moving on that too.

The knitting is never done, is it?

3/29 - So close. I am SO CLOSE that I can practically feel this sweater on me. I’m halfway up the front of the final panel. I really think that I might be able to finish it this weekend. Maybe? I hope? Ohhhh, I just want to be able to put it ON! It snowed today, quite out of the blue, and we got about an inch or two. It surprised me and I was a little unhappy because I am SO done with winter, but at the same time, it make me think “Oh yay, at least I’ll be able to wear this sweater when it’s done instead of just sticking it in the drawer!”

4/10 - Done. Done done done done thank the LORD done! I thought this would be done so much sooner but I became sidetracked by a few things. To start with, it hit a point where I couldn’t take it with me to work any more to work on during lunch breaks because it was just too massive to lug around. I started making it up and realized that somehow, the sleeve cap was about 3 inches too long for the armholes. I’m not sure how that happened except to say that I finished the sleeves before I had actually done the back and fronts, so I just didn’t have a way to eyeball it. Those had to be ripped back and redone with the decrease shaping I had done for the armholes. It looks to me like the decrease shaping was different for the sleeve caps from the armhole shaping, but that might have just been me. Then I got the sinus infection from hell that knocked me flat for a few days. I did manage to sew down all the flower petals during that time and my god, just doing one flower showed me immediately how gorgeous this sweater was going to be. Once that was done, I started shaping the neckline, since I didn’t want a hood. (Thank god, because I was starting to run WAY LOW on yardage.) I did some rapid decreasing then did about 10 rows of ribbing. I tried to do a buttonhole in the ribbing but it pulled all wrong and looked sloppy. So after sewing on the rest of the buttons last night, I played around with a few different ways to attach a tab or a loop or something at the neckline. The final product isn’t as perfect as I would hope, but that’s just the nature of the way that yarn stretches itself. It’s as close to perfect as I can make it and to be honest, the sweater is so beautiful that I don’t even care. I’m sure I’ll wear it open most of the time. I technically finished the knitting last night, but today I went around the buttonholes and just tacked down their edges some so I wouldn’t catch and make a new hole when I’m trying to close it up. It will get a bath sometime this week when I have time to lay it out, and then photos GALORE! This is my new favourite thing that I’ve ever made and, I’m proud to say, is a fantastic way of kicking off my goal of finishing 6 sweaters in 2011.
It’s funny, I realized last night that I did all of the knitting for this in 2011. Because I had to rip out and rework the back and the front panel that I had finished, I’ve really only been working on this since February. Amazing to think about, right?
Amazing to be finished with it. Today was HOT - 80 degrees in Cleveland - but I know there will be some cooler days and evenings when I’ll get to wear my new favourite thing and show it off. Sylvi, I love you. And this yarn? Oh this yarn is amazing. Just soft enough, just warm enough, and I think just sturdy enough to keep from endlessly pilling. I had JUST ENOUGH yardage - I only have 2 yards left, the teeniest yarn ball ever - but as long as I had enough to make it, that’s all that I care about. Oh, and I just entered the yardage for this into my KnitMeter - this sweater is almost 1 mile of yarn. Amazing.

6/11 - So I just realized that I forgot to write down the end of the sweater saga here. That bath it took? Nearly ruined it. The sweater pretty much doubled in size. I had expected some growth but nowhere NEAR that much. My friends and I think that when I spun out the water, it stretched itself. I don’t see how it couldn’t have, since this sweater weighs a LOT when it’s soaking wet. All I know is I laid it out to dry, went to put it on a few days later when the weather had gone cool again, and it looked like it was made for someone who was over 6 feet tall and weighed several hundred pounds. All I could do was gape at myself in the mirror and keep trying to readjust it - pull it up higher on my shoulders or tug on the sleeves, as if that were the issue!

As the photos show, I was able to undo the damage. I gave it a hot bath - I filled up my washing machine with hot water and let it soak without turning on any cycle for about 30 minutes. Then I scooped the sweater into a gigantic mesh bag, pressed out as much of the water as I could, then hung the bag in my bathtub to drip most of the way out. I carefully measured it when I laid it out to dry - it was still a bit big, but definitely improved. I threw it in the dryer for about 40 minutes and that helped some but really didn’t shrink it to the degree I had hoped for.

I think the stretchiness of the seed stitch combined with weight of the sweater itself just works against it completely. If I had to do it over again, I’d probably block the pieces separately. Of course, then it would just stretch out the first time I washed it for real, I suppose. I’m going to go around the seamed areas and do a crochet chain to really shore them up. Across the back of the neck and the armholes is where it really seems to need some extra ballast.

3/16/13 - How sad is it that I just now finally got around to doing a crochet chain around the armholes and across the back of the neck? Oh well, it’s DONE. I think it provides some difference…I still wish the back of it fit a little better and tighter, but at this point, I don’t think there’s much I can do about that without purposely shrinking it!