I made an awesome sweater I couldn’t wear. It broke my lil ole heart. I have a neck issue. Nothing touches the neck. This sweater broke that rule. The weight of the beads on the front of the sweater tipped the balance and caused the weight of the front of the sweater to pull the sweater toward the front causing the back neck to touch the part of my neck that’s damaged. Ugh. So I gifted it to my niece who loves it.
I still want a banner sweater so as time passed I did a reboot. Using Omega Sinfonia (mercerized cotton) I knit an awesome intarsia collar, worked a conti-rag shoulder and started a new banner. It had an irreparable error AND the yarn proved to be heavier than I could comfortably wear, something closer to worsted than light DK. Still, it’s GORGEOUS . . . just not workable/wearable because of the error and due to the weight of the yarn.
Using Bamboo Pop Anchor (an incredible color) and a variety of brights in Bamboo Pop and Hobbii Rainbow Bamboo I reknit the collar . . . six (?) times. Yup, not kidding. Too big, too small, too big, too small . . . I even had a conversation with a friend on the issues I was having getting the right collar for the project. Ugh times six. Then I shared the repeat issue. With a repeat of 20 stitches (five colors with five separating background colors) I had a choice of 100 stitches (too small) or 120 stitches (too big). Don’t ask me why I kept repeating the knit big, knit small thing. I love intarsia and I just kept repeating the same things to no avail.
At some point I got a clue and realized I needed to change the repeat. I’m pleading FIH at this point. It was a rough week!
I did the math for six (no, just no), seven (ugh), eight (yeah, not gonna work) and finally did the math for nine. GOLDEN! 108 stitches. Perfect! I dug through my stash and picked additional brights and I was off and running.
You can see where this is going right? Yup.
And then I hit the next snag. I’ve been fighting the spring-off from a standing crew-shaped collar to my conti-something shoulder for YEARS. Not religiously, mind you, just occasional attempts whenever the wild hare came racing through. This time I nailed it. I’m in absolutely in alt. After reknitting until I got a result I was happy with (for posterity, the solution was add a stitch between each background color column to get me closer to a workable starting stitch count adding a total of 9×3 then knit the restraining row of herringbone stitch and work k2tog/gsrt for the drop stitches [if this totally baffles you let me know and I’ll explain]) I then hit the shoulder issue. Mind you, I hadn’t frogged the Sinfonia start. I *could* have looked at it to see what had gone before. Did I? Oh hell no.
I LOVE my conti-something shoulder so in total mindless bliss that’s what I knit from the collar out. Uh . . . yeah. Not gonna work. The conti-something technique requires adding a stitch every other row to increase the width of the sleeve and that breaks the integrity of the 2-stitch intarsia columsn. <crying> Yeah, totally ruins the plot.
This unforced error resulted in two choices, (1) frog back the start of the banner and delay it to where it starts passed the sleeve increases (a totally workable solution) or (2) frog the beautiful and flawless conti-something shoulder and restart using the modified conti-rag.
Because everything up to this point on the sweater is literally flawless, I’m going with door number 2.