Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays and almost goodbye to 2022
As I’m writing this, my power is out because of the historic freeze happening across the country. Rolling blackouts, thankfully. One of the good things about knitting is it doesn’t require electricity (during the day, at least). Another great thing about having knitting as a hobby is lots of warm mittens, hats and sweaters to keep you warm. Even if you live in a warmer area, there’s usually at least one week in the year that I’m grateful to have a stash of knits to pull from.
And that’s about it from last week to this one. I’m still working on the pumpkin sweater. I reached the pumpkin charts of the yoke last night. This sweater has been… “easy” but frustrating. 3 colors stranded colorwork isn’t a walk in the park, yet I keep choosing to do it. I’ve had to tink back entire rows a few times now. There’s a few places I’ve decided to forgo the 3rd color and just go back in with duplicate stitch later.
Trying on the sweater now, I’m very afraid it will be too big. Instead of slowing down and making several gauge swatches and pre-planning, I forged ahead and told myself I would figure it out as I went.
First, I got a bit overwhelmed with designing yoke shaping, especially with the original color work charts which were 44 sts wide throughout the entire yoke, so I had to figure out the shaping from scratch. And, to be honest, most of my searching has only given me directions or information about increasing a yoke from the top down, not decreasing from bottom up. That could be Google’s fault, not the bloggers, because Google just sucks as a search engine these days. And I know I could reverse engineer the top down directions for bottom up, but at that point I was too lazy and my brain hurt too much to deal with it. I wanted to knit, not do math! Lets go!
I basically kept the charts all in one size stitch counts and inserted the decreases on the fly when I felt it was a good place colorwork wise. It was a lot of stopping, putting down my knitting, counting sts, and doing math in the thick of it.
So based on quick gauge checks before I cast on, I thought my yoke charts would be the correct length. But now that I’m in the thick of it, it looks like my colorwork gauge is way off. I think I’m so paranoid about my floats being too tight, that I’m overcompensating and now my colorwork section is really loose! My colorwork gauge is looser than my plain knit gauge!
I even put my gauge into an online “calculator” to see what my decrease rate should be, and the calculator literally came up with an error saying “yeah, that gauge can’t be right.”
So of course now my yoke is going to be longer than the approximate math, charts, and calculations I did before casting on.
I’m seriously considering ripping out the entire yoke section to reknit it with this new gauge. Maybe moving the charts around to move the pumpkins lower, shorten the bottom sections, move some of the colorwork to the sleeves and…ugh. Just ugh. After so much effort with 3 colors colorwork and untangling strands and tinking back rows…I don’t want to start again. Even if I know it would result in a better fitting sweater.
Actually, I don’t know that! I could frog the entire yoke, reknit it, and still find out something later that could mess up the fit. I’m not 100% sure that it’s unsalvageable now!
A bit stressful, obviously. I keep trying the sweater on, pulling the circular needle cords tight to close the yoke across the shoulders, and squinting my eyes to decide “will it be too big? Or will it end up fine?” I don’t know. I’m just winging it at this point. (Another point to top down sweaters – great for trying it on as you go.)
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