Comments | bandraoi: Knitting meltdown

bandraoi

Knitting meltdown

Jan 13, 2009 15:40

I want to shoot myself in the head at this point.

I know, I know...melodramatic, considering it has to do with, of all things, knitting. But ( Read more... )

sweater o' doom, knitting

Comments 11

nerinedorman January 14 2009, 04:08:47 UTC

Well, you got helluva far, even if it was over a decade. That kind of work makes my brain fry. Have you tried crotcheting?

bandraoi January 15 2009, 23:38:47 UTC

Yes, I have...ironically, one of the things I like so much about knitting is that, for me, it's easier to tell (usually) when I've dropped stitches and stuff and trace back on a knitted project. I used to always make sure to make the extra stitch on a crocheted project every time I started a new row, and I still ended up with the ends shortening and shortening!

livejoan January 14 2009, 04:49:46 UTC

As a seamstress I know so well the frustrations of taking something apart that didn't go together right the first time.

I've done a little crochet, but no knitting. Back in... the 70's when those crocheted vests were popular, I made one. Didn't do any more after that, though. (Don't they have patterns for such sweaters that you can follow, instead of trying to guess how to shape it? I seem to remember seeing such in the craft stores.)

bandraoi January 15 2009, 23:41:06 UTC

Actually, I /was/ following a pattern. Well, my extrapolation of a basic pattern. When they tell you two panels repeat every six rows, one repeats every 17, and one every 24 or so, I had to sit there and write it out how each row fit together...I suspect I either screwed up and picked it back up years later on the wrong row, skipping some of those decreases.

the_gwenzilliad January 14 2009, 07:13:51 UTC

For the back neck, just make sure you leave the same number of stitches on the holder as for the front. If the sweater has saddle shoulders, you probably will be asked to pick up additional stitches for the neck.

Sometimes back armhole depth won't match the front, but almost never. If I were you, I would eyeball it and make it look right.

As for the sleeves, not knowing how the pattern is written I can't advise, but if you can provide me with a copy of the pattern, I'll bet I could help.

And, as an aside, every knitter has at least one project like this. Mine was the ten-year aran. In the end, the dye lots were mismatched, the neck was too big, and now it swallows me whole since I've lost all that weight (and if I told you how much smaller it was actually supposed to be in the beginning, you'd laugh!), but I love it, because it's the first big aran I ever completed.

Feel free to give me a shout in email or IM or whatever if you want help.

bandraoi January 15 2009, 23:45:58 UTC

Thank you for the offer of help, O Angel of Knitting Mercy! Now that I've cooled off, I think I might have the patience to eyeball it and make it look at least workable if I'm careful. If I get to that point, I will run the sleeve pattern past you for a look.

I suspect this thing will still be kind of big, if what I did on the first sweater I made was any indication. In spite of trying to keep the tension as tight as I possibly could (until my hands ached!), it was still very big on me. Even though that cotton sweater was a "spring" sweater, I have to always wear a tight-fitting turtleneck with long sleeves under it or else it just looks weird and sacklike on my bare neck and arms. Maybe this won't be so bad since it already has long sleeves...well, assuming I get that far!

bandraoi January 15 2009, 23:50:23 UTC

And OMFG on the ten-year Aran...it looks suspiciously close to the pattern I am working on. Though the diamonds on yours close back up. Mine are basically just repeating, open triangles.

geminiknight January 14 2009, 15:26:16 UTC

Totally offtopic, but I thought you might get a chuckle out of it anywho, even if you were a court dictation type person instead of a medical one (I think ( ... )

bandraoi January 16 2009, 00:00:00 UTC

Yup, doctors and lawyers are pretty much the same, just on different extremes of the totalitarian asshole scale. :D

And even though I'm not a medical transcriptionist, from what I know about doctors and the way a lot of them treat "the help," all of this is probably 100% true with very little in the way of exaggeration.

velvetdahlia January 14 2009, 19:10:18 UTC

Some projects are just doomed. The frustration just makes it harder.

I had an Alice Starmore Aran like this. No matter how many times I started over it was always wrong, but wrong differently each try. I was totally defeated by it!

I don't know if it would bug you but you could even up the sides with knitted panels or something? A cabled inset?

Inset sleeves always spell doom for me. After having to rip too many inset sleeve sweaters I now stick to raglans or seamless sleeves.

bandraoi January 15 2009, 23:53:52 UTC

It's actually not bad enough to have to fill it in..I think I've just got to keep knitting it and continuing to decrease until I have reached the requisite amount of stitches. I didn't get very far into the armhole before I realized that it's not been decreased enough...it'll just be at a slightly different angle. It just made me so mad because it made me realize how much I don't remember about the damned thing, when there was a point where it made sense even to my knitting-amateur brain.