8/11 - Washed, blocked, and sewn. Complete finished object!

8/4 - We’re done! Just washing and blocking and sewing stand in my way now. :D

7/28 - Hooray! Neck is all fixed now, with a minimum of fuss, though picking out steeks is a scary process. I’m actually currently working on one of the armbands, which I’m of course also altering! The arms will be ribbed sleeves of a length I haven’t decided yet, made with short-row shaping. I picked up stitches all around the armhole, then knit back and forth across the first 6 stitches, then the next back and forth picked up two stitches on each side, and have continued around in this pattern. I’m so excited to nearly be done! :)

7/19 - Project restarted - the time off was good for morale! I have picked up stitches about six inches from the top and frogged down to there, secured the steeked portions, and alternately re-cast steeks and knit around to connect the vest together again. I’m going to move the neck opening down considerably, resulting in thicker straps but not much more math.

6/17 - Neck ribbing added and… oh no. Shoulders are a good six inches too tall. Completely unwearable. This is so sad. :( I think I will put this down for a while and come back when I am not so crushed so I can figure out how to fix it.

6/16 - STEEKS ARE CUT! All survivors! Shoulders are joined, too. So close to being done…

6/14 - Hit a snag when I ran out of the tan yarn, but Ravelry provides! Acquired more from fellow Ravelrer ilovemath. I’m now finished with all the body knitting! I will finish reinforcing the steeks over the next couple of days and do the cutting at my knitting group on Wednesday. Fingers crossed!

5/18 - Making -very- good progress. The short row shaping on the bust certainly messed up the pattern, making four repeats instead of two for a little while, but I think that will be missable on the final product. Have steeks going in all the proper places. The girls in my knitting group insist that I have to do the cutting there in front of them. ;) By next week, hopefully!

5/6 - RIGHT. So. Big update here.

I was noticing that I thought the vest was turning out longer than it should. I measured, and each one of my diamonds was about 4.5” long. The front of the pattern is about 6.5 diamonds tall. This makes a little over 29” tall for the whole vest. The size notes say that my size, 40, should be 23.5” tall. Mrp. I check my gauge, and it’s true - while I’m spot-on for width gauge (22 over 4”), my height is quite off. It’s supposed to be 30 over 4”, and mine’s more like 23. This will give me a very tall vest.

So, time for math. I just got to the step of increasing after the waist, so I can change all of the increases from here on out and shorten the pattern enough to make up for my wrong gauge. So instead of increasing every X rows 7 times and then making the armhole, I’m going to increase every X-2 rows (masking the numbers just in case, given that it’s a copyrighted pattern.) the same amount of time. This cuts me down about 2” from the waist to the armhole, which sounds about right.

I’m pulling the start of the neckline down 1.5” and the shoulders down the full 6” I need to. The difference between them is now a need to increase 23 stitches over 74 rows, which comes out to an increase every three rows with 5 left over. This actually spaces out quite well: 3/3/3/4/3/3/3/4/3/3/3/4/3/3/3/4/3/3/3/4/3/3/3 (3x18+4x5 = 54+20 = 74, hooray math!)

So the vest will have a longer bottom, which I’m fine with, and be shorter from the waist to the armholes, the waist to the V-neck, and the armholes/V-neck to the shoulders. Excellent.

Also, since I can’t let good enough go, I’m going to add short row shaping in the bust. A lot of the pictures I’ve seen on Ravelry show that this vest has problems with large-busted women - which I am! - so I’m going to fix that. It’s going to involve doing some funky things to the argyle pattern, though…

5/4/10 - I have completed the shaping decreases. Next up, the increases, then the steeks begin! I have only made one mistake so far, repeating a pattern row, but hopefully no one but me will ever notice it.

4/28/10 - Good progress being made. Took some pictures.

4/23/10 - Finally started. 6s were the key. I’m almost to the top of the ribbing band and about to start the colorwork!

4/19/10 - I am still swatching. Seriously. I started off on maybe sz 2 needles, and my stitches were way too small. Went up to 3s and then 5s, and still too small. On 7s now and hopeful. Jeez.

12/29/09 - Decided to start off with this. Sadly looks like it’ll actively require gauge swatching. Boo.