Monday, October 08, 2007

Dead Leaves and a Solution?

Well I must have been thinking about the next FO I was going to blog about when I accidentally typed "drop stitch" instead of "drop shoulder" in my last post (well, my last real post). That's because there is a non-intentional dropped stitch somewhere in this sweater:


Meet Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground aka the Lace Leaf Pullover from Loop-d-Loop. Dead Leaves was knit on US 11 needles using Rowan Polar in color Combat. I used less than 5 balls of yarn for this sweater. Modifications? The usual- waist shaping. I decreased a total of 12 stitches and then increased 12, following the shaping on Marilyn, since they were knit at a similar gauge. Verdict? I like it a lot. The yarn is a little itchy, but I guess I'll usually be wearing a tank top under it at the very least (or a long-sleeved shirt if I wear it to work), and I have thoughts about re-blocking the neck so that its a bit wider. Good idea? You can also see the graft line (cuts my boobs in half laterally), but I'm thinking that will even itself out after a few wearings. Why is there grafting involved in this sweater, you ask? Well, I guess you can't knit lace leaves upside-down, so you knit the bottom half bottom-up, then the top half top-down, and then graft them together. Which some people hated, but I loooooove grafting. Seriously, love it. Its a way to knit with a darning needle- how darned cool is that?! Sorry, moving on... Oh and speaking of grafting- seaming and grafting with this yarn is a BITCH. It gets fluffier and loftier until it is essentially roving and really easy to pull apart. In fact, I'm going to blame the yarn for my dropping a stitch when I was grafting the top to the bottom. I realized it after I was done and didn't feel like going back, so I just pulled the offending stitch inside the sweater and tacked it down with some yarn.
As an aside... I accidentally bought a lot of this yarn (we won't say how much or how one "accidentally" buys too much yarn. But it honestly was a mistake, and lets just say that British currency was involved and leave it at that) and was thinking that, especially since they are 100gm balls, a whole sweater would make a dent in the pile I had, right? Nope, less than 5 balls used. So, it looks like I'll be knitting a simple all-one-piece raglan out of this yarn, because I'm not freaking seaming anything with it ever again!

Ok, onto the promised "solution?" to my drop-SHOULDER sweater problem mentioned here. Well, here is the body and cowl of the sweater

This is the Placed Cable Aran. And I love the sweater. But yeah, drop shoulder, not for me. So I think I might rip everything out to the armpits and re-knit it as a set-in shoulder sweater, so that I can keep the cables the way they are. I'm afraid that if I knit it up as a raglan, I'd lose a big chunk of the cables along the way. The one and only thing that pains me about doing all of this is that what I've knit so far has already been blocked out. I guess that shouldn't matter, but I've never re-knit already-blocked yarn. Well, here goes nothing!

1 comment:

alligator said...

Nice job on your Lace-Leaf Pullover! I knit this sweater last year and now I'm jealous of your waist shaping! Good luck modifying the Placed Cable Aran, I was really intrigued by that pattern as well but I was distracted by the cowl, I didn't even notice it was a drop shoulder!