Death by Seaming
Baby Norgi is looking much more polished today. I spent about 3 and a half hours setting in the second sleeve, sewing down the sleeve facings and the cuff & hem facings, and weaving in all the ends from the colorwork! All that's left is to pick up stitches around the neckline, knit the neckband, and sew down its facing. Then I'm done with this project finally!
I was about 4-5" into sewing down the facing on the first sleeve when I noticed:
I was sewing it down on the wrong side! The whole point of the facing (besides making lots of extra, tedious, eye-blurring work for me...) is to cover the raw edges of the steek inside the seam so they won't fray so much. And there I was merrily sewing it down to the wrong side with the raw edges still quite visible! See the cut edge on the left? And the strand of thread halfway up the seam on the right?
So I undid all those (tiny) stitches and fixed it.
The facings are interesting, but make the armholes kind of bulky and, because of the linear (non-knitting) stitches going around the armhole to sew down the facing, make it a good deal less stretchy...I don't know if this will be good for the structure of the sweater or bad, making it harder for Owen to get his arms into the sleeves!
After the first sleeve facing, I wove in all the colorwork ends (that was a massive undertaking too, even for such small sections of colorwork!) and stitched down the hem facings on the bottom hem and cuffs.
(on the left you see the unsewn facing, on the right the first one sewn up...)
Then I cut the second steek,
(OK, in the picture is actually the first steek because - Ha! - by the time I got to the second one, it was no longer so noteworthy and so I forgot to take a picture. :-) But the second one was much the same. The sweater's in superwash wool but the machine stitching held the stitches in with no problem, even with all the agitation they got from me trying to hold sleeves in place to sew the seams...and that was a ridiculous lot of agitation, I assure you!)
And then I sewed the second shoulder seam
(It needs ironing, but not till the whole thing's done)
Then I set in the second sleeve. It went easier this time than the first one, but still really fiddly, mainly because I should have had Mom make the steek stitching deeper on the sides = bigger armholes; carefully as I measured the width of the sleeve caps when I marked where the steeks should go, either the sleeves grew since then or the body of the sweater shrank up a little, because there was more sleeve fabric there than body fabric, resulting in these terribly puckered armholes:
Kind of disappointing, and the bulk added by the sleeve facings did not help at all with the pucker.
Anyway, all that's left now is the neckband and then this will be a Finished Object!
