Ruthless Knitting

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Vagaries of Blocking

Sometimes, it takes two pictures to replace a thousand words

Hand eaten

A disheartening before and after

As I feared, Frances’s sleeves are too long now. Way, way too long. But I am not excessively sad about it — otherwise, the sweater looks pretty good. It’s longer and wider and drapier than it was when I finished knitting it, and there’s a little bit of a batwing thing going on when I raise my arms, and it’s possible that every time I wear the sweater it will stretch until it finally reaches the floor, but I’m only willing to worry about one problem at a time. I’m going to shorten the arms, and then I’m going to wait until it’s cold enough to wear a silk sweater, at which time I’ll reevaluate the situation.

Here’s a quickie FO picture taken with the self-timer that expresses my general laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing. How can you complain about a beautiful stripey silk sweater, even if the sleeves are a bit on the long side?

Frances oh well

“Oh well,” she says.
“Let’s not take the knitting too seriously.”

I’ll take some more pictures once I get the sleeves in shape.

And now for something completely different

In more heartening news, Christine has translated the Sheldon pattern into French. TrĂ©s magnifique! I wish I understood French well enough to read it, but all I can manage after a year of eighth-grade French and another year of grad school French for Reading (which should be called “just enough French so that you could conceivably translate a French document badly with the help of two dictionaries”) is the occasional mispronounced phrase. My apologies, France. Regardless of my deficiencies, I am pleased that French-speaking knitters will now have access to the pattern.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 9:55 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Vagaries of Blocking”

  1. Pigwotknits Says:
    September 6th, 2007 at 10:02 am

    Wow, that’s quite an increase. It drapes beautifully though.

  2. desiknitter Says:
    September 6th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    Aiieee. I clicked “print post” instead of submit comment, and lost what I had written. Briefly - sew the sleeve insides? beautiful drape and fit! bummer about length.

  3. mel Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 7:34 am

    Oh dear! I wouldn’t have thought it would grown so much - the drape-i-ness is really lovely though. I really like the design - and the fit otherwise is great, definitely worth tweaking!

  4. Emilee Says:
    September 7th, 2007 at 9:43 pm

    Wow, that’s a pretty impressive increase. I agree with Mel though, it has a lovely drape.

    The batwing thing is a design feature ;)

  5. Wanda Says:
    September 8th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    Too bad a/b the sleeves. I would rework the sleeves, but it’s good you have such a laissez faire attitude about the knit. No angst on your part.

  6. Mishka Says:
    September 9th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

    Wow, that really grew! I don’t remember whether you knit them top down or bottom up, but either way, you should be able to shorten them without re-working the whole sleeve. Otherwise, I agree–it looks different now, but it’s very nice!

  7. DeltaDawn Says:
    September 23rd, 2007 at 7:58 am

    (Chuckling) I call it hotel and food French - I took it continuously from 6th grade through freshman year in college, wrote papers in it, and can now manage to keep us out of trouble on vacation - and that’s about it!

    Love the silk stripey sweater and the saga of all the swatches (wrapping up all my comments here).

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