(De)construction Weekend

Sunday, January 04, 2009

I think it's a testament to my growth as a knitter and, hopefully, an increase in my patience that I can now...

...calmly hack up a sweater I knit in order to fix something.  Here is my Scoop Neck Vest Sweater after picking out, stitch-by-bloody-stitch, the beautiful tubular bind-off of the neckline (132 stitches, to be exact).  Next came the sleeves...

But you must be very, very careful which thread you cut or can end up swearing quite a bit...

...like I did here.  Always cut the seam stitches from INside the sweater so it's easy to see which is the seam stitch and which is just a little ladder between stitches.

Ta-da!  Hacked up sweater!  And it barely even hurt (me; I can't speak for the sweater).

And here are the pieces that needed to be fixed.  The whole reason I hacked it apart was because of something I foresaw when I made it: the front strap was about nine rows longer than the back strap.  I thought it was odd but trusted the pattern, which I usually advise you do... unless, of course, the pattern isn't right or is seeming like it's going to cause serious problems which, in this case, it did.  The shoulder seam, once this sucker was all finished up initially, fell beHIND the top of my shoulder.  Those extra nine stitches caused the armhole to be slightly too big and so it was constantly falling off my shoulders.  It was annoying and made the whole sweater look frumpy.

So yeah, we come to today: the actual fixing of the straps took about ten minutes.  The deconstructing and reconstructing the sweater?  An entire afternoon and the first quarter of a football game (we lost).  Was it worth it?  Hell yeah!  I've had the sweater on now for a couple of hours and nothing has slipped off my shoulders even once!  It looks the same as before though so I didn't bother taking any new pictures.  

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The other sweater I hacked apart was my Not-So-Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan.  I added sleeves and I absolutely adore it now.  I actually did the first sleeve right before Christmas while waiting for more Little Birds yarn and did the entire second sleeve yesterday.  I've been a girl on a mission this weekend!  I'll post pictures of the sleeved one soon.

Thanks to my perserverance, and knowledge that classes begin again in a week and I won't have time anymore for it, I now have two more hand-knit sweaters to keep me warm this winter.  That's five total!  Yay!

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I apologize for the extra-long post but I just wanted to say I'm so glad I took the plunge and "fixed" these two sweaters.  I'd had them both for a long time (slightly over a year for one and slightly under a year for the other) and had only worn them a handful of times each because of the silly little problems: no sleeves make for a cold Katie and droopy shoulders suck.  Now I know I'll wear them all the time!  And all it took was a few hours here and there of fixing... but would have taken no time had I listened to my intuition in the first place.  

I hope I've learned something...

Happy New Year, everyone!