We’ll start with the provisional failure and you probably already know what’s coming. I spent most of yesterday working on the Autumn Seeds sweater. My thought process had been that if I put the time in, I could conceivably have the beast done by today so that I could proudly show off my very first knitted sweater.
Ummm...no.
Too damned big :)
The body width I could live with if it hadn’t meant that the armscyes went halfway down to my waist (or where my waist would be if I had one) making necessary the decrease of umpty-zillion stitches before getting to the wrist and having only about eight inches to do it in. Sigh… However, I will take this lesson with me as I move forward. I am not thwarted nor cowed - well, not much anyways :) Overall this has been a positive experience and well worth doing. It’s just that right now, I’m tired of wracking my brain over this thing and need to put it out of sight for a bit. I haven’t given up on it - only on what I thought it was going to be and I need a little time to adjust to what it actually is. Then I will finish the sleeves and make the accessories.
The draw is another hat :) This one is probably 6 months to 1 year size and is being modeled on a fat ball of chunky yarn because I lack a real baby :)
The success - first let me apologize to last night’s Chatters group as I whined incessantly about being afraid to work with lace weight yarn. Now let me thank last night’s Chatters group for offering their support and suggestions. After I shut down the chat room last night, I did this:
Have a great weekend all :)
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*Blue* frog hair?! Themind boggles. 
Congrats on your courage to use laceweight! That was my concern at first, too. But the two laceweights I’ve used (wool and silk) were both surprisingly strong.
Mimi - Well, maybe they’re alien frogs?
Laura - This is certainly going to be a learning experience :) That’s a good thing, right?
I’m sorry about the sweater but I applaud your resolve to make lemonade out of the lemon. :) Can’t wait to see more of your lacey goodness!
Robbyn, Congrats on facing the terrifying lace yarn monster! I am continuing with my lace projects on fingering but really really want to go back to lace weight. I am still considering Icarus as a way of getting bored instead of frightened by such fine yarn. and no, it is not breakable! I just can’t read the *#!!**! stitches. Sorry about the sweater frustration—been there and it is no fun. I enjoyed Chatters last night.
sometimes putting a project into an enforced ‘time out’ will cause you to have a real *eureka* moment that just propels you right on through it eventually-
froghair is amazingly resilient- the only time i ever managed to wreck any laceweight was when i was working with some kind of ‘no name’ one ply brand that i think was spun from kleenex- otherwise, the stuff can take a pretty good tug and remain intact-
i like your model for the baby hat- i’ll bet it is far more obedient and much stiller for a photo shoot than a wriggly little person who really doesn’t want to be wearing a hat in the house to begin with!
stay happy-
see we knew you could do it :]
Is the frog hair blue or more violet? Hard to tell on my monitor. Either way is good :]
Chatters was fun last night.
oh and I just had another thought. If you were tempted to do the baby hat again, [ which I hope you will cos the bobbles are CUTE ] you could keep with the garter stitch and do the decreases with short row shaping
Bron - Thanks for the encouragement. I know they won’t all turn out like this - but it is a little disappointing :)
Rob - I seriously like your take on Icarus which is (to my eye) a lovely finished project - but which I think would bore me silly to make :)
Don’t be so hard on yourself - reading the !@#$%^&* stitches will come - think of it as like learning to read music - this is just a time signature in which you’re not yet comfortable :)
Barb - Well, by last night I was ready to frog the whole damned thing which is what I’d need to do to fix the problem. But then it really would go back in the bin, never to be heard from again. So instead it gets to rest a while.
I am so intimidated by the froghair - you should see how slowly I’m going on this scarf - and yet, it’s beginning to show it’s shape and it doesn’t look too bad at that! Whoa!
Susan The color is what I generally think of as periwinkle (just a lot# on the label) which is mostly blue with a little violet mixed in. It’s about my favorite color :)
The short rowing for the top of the baby hat is an interesting idea - except I like picking up the stitches and doing it in the round :) Thanks about the bobbles - one of my favorite embellishments. They’re such fun to play with!
Go buy a LOT of unwaxed dental floss and put in lifelines! Put one in now. Right this minute so you save what’s right when something goes wrong. My first lace project had a lifeline every repeat. Ok, a bit much but you’ll feel better with one. :)
Sorry to hear about the sweater....I know you will get back to it sometime. Congrats on your lace knitting. May I offer a suggestion? When you get a repeat going....thread in a lifeline, I usually use a thin piece of crochet cotton. Thread it throuh the current row on your needle. If, you make an error further on, you can frog it to the lifeline. It really is a lifesaver.
I meant to say before .. I LOVE the little point on the baby hat. It may not have necessarily been intended [ which incidentally we wouldn’t have known that if you hadn’t said so ] but it just adds a certain quirkiness to the whole thing.
Nancy - Dental Floss? Really? Hmmm...I will be going out this afternoon :)
Maureen - You lnow, I had read about lifelines but never imagined I would be in a position to use one :)
THanks to both you and Nancy for mentioning them though because when I pick this up, I get so focused on the stitches that I totally forget about everything else!
Susan - You know, after I stopped thinking about how it wasn’t flat or rounded, I kind of decided that I liked the point as well. I love quirky hats - especially for little ones :)
I’m sorry to hear that your sweater didn’t live up to your expectations. I think Barb in TX has it right. A time out could inspire you to greater heights with the project or to a better reconciliation to what it really is.
Congratulations on knitting lace. That’s a lovely scarf pattern and I’ve bookmarked it for later consumption. You picked a beautiful colour for it. Lace yarns are amazing in their delicate strength.
Opal - Thanks for the sweater comfort :)
I have never used yarn this fine before and it’s going to take me a while to get somfortable with it. Today, I bought some bamboo double points, 7” long. With point protectors on the ends, they should be a lot more convenient than the 12” needles I’ve been using - which were the only ones I had in the right size and material (bamboo).
I’m hoping this will help me to improve my speed a little!
My first top-down sweater was a little bigger than I imagined, too. And the armholes were DEEP. My second one (still on the needles) is a much better fit, and here’s what I did:
With the typical directions, you’re increasing 8 stitches on every other round. So, the body and the sleeves are increasing at the same rate. Front, back, and each sleeve is increasing 2 stitches every other row, or more simply 1 stitch per row.
So, what I did was use EZ’s percentage system, and I went with a 35% upper arm. I think the range is 35-40% (her daugher Meg’s changes...I think EZ’s orginal percentage for upper arm was 33%). Anyhoo, what I realized was that by the time I had the number of stitches you need for body width, the sleeve width actually ended up being like 41%. And by the time I got to the right body width, I was longer than I wanted to be. So, what I did was figure out what 35% of my finished circumference was. And then I did the math to figure out how many FEWER increase rounds I would need for the sleeves. I think it turned out to be 4 or 6. In other words, there would be four times that I would increase the body when I wouldn’t want to increase the sleeves. OR...what helps to make the sweater not so deep is to have four times when you increase two more stitches on the front and back (4 total). Then you get to the underarm a few rows sooner. Hey, every little bit helps. Also, I decided that no matter how many stitches I had, if I tried it on and saw that I was at the underarm, that I would just cast on the extra stitches at the underarm, even if it was more than the pattern called for.
I’m at work now, so I don’t have access to my notebook with all the math in it. If you want more clarification or concrete examples of the numbers, feel free to e-mail me.
Marcy - My god girl, you’re a fount of information! All of what you said makes sense and I think I can figure out the math as you outlined it. That should go a LONG ways towards making the next sweater a little more...streamlined?...than this one. Thanks so much for the analysis - that’s a big help!
I totally frogged my first top down sweater, which was based on the Knitty Banff pattern, but knit with a completely different weight yarn… I then made it into a vest for a preggie friend!
Nat! :)
I did consider it but I couldn’t go through with it. I figure it will be a fine out-door cover up and god knows I can cover up a lot with it :) I’ll do long, loose sleeves on the thing, probably matching the bottom to the bottom of the sweater.
And the I’ll give some thought to how to go about making another one that actually fits well :) Live and learn, eh?
