Victory is mine!

Success!!  The scary scabbard sweater has been completed, and with minimal errors towards the end.  Once I got past the armholes for the last time it went much more quickly.  I adjusted the quantity of pattern repeats to have the hem hit me at my hipbones, a much more flattering length on my post-babies body.  So, for the body of the sweater I worked about 3 fewer repeats then were called for before increasing for the morphing of the side cable from a braided cable into a horseshoe cable.  Then I was only able to do 3 repeats of the pattern for the horseshoe cabling rather than 5, but it still looks pretty good to me.

For the hem I followed the pattern and did a tubular cast off on the bottom hem which I have used successfully before.  Not this time though!  I seem to be forever casting off as though I am attempting to restrain a would be assailant.  I COULD NOT get the thing over my hips, it was a struggle just to get it back off over my shoulders.  Need I say just how frustrated I was at this point?  Yeah, just a bit.  So with Mister Vonkysmeed's urging I decided to work on the sleeves before fighting with the hem again. 

I made the unusually wise decision that as I had only 1 skein left, dividing it in half might be the best plan for ending up with sleeves of identical length.  But do I have a kitchen scale with which to scientifically make 2 out of 1?  Nope, so I had the great joy of unwinding that last ball of yarn all over my family room.  And guess who wanted to join in the fun?  If you guessed Destructo-Boy, than by George, you are a winner!  So I had Mister Vonkysmeed hold onto him in the back half of the house until I managed to tame the yarn beast into submission.  Trying to madly wind balls of yarn with an 18 month old screaming at the other end of the house is not exactly relaxing let me tell you!

Fighting the sweater monster!

I have been arguing with my Silken Scabbard pattern off and on now since March 4th. The argument started even before I cast on any stitches with the Knit Picks website picture of the Aegean color of their Elegance yarn being completely WRONG as to the actual color of the yarn. Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely shade & I am still using it, but the color is nowhere close to what I expected based on the website image. As for the beginnings of the actual sweater, I'm going cheat a little and copy and paste from my project details on Ravelry so you can see what has happened thus far. After starting on March 3rd, and getting the joy of re-reading each line of the pattern about 5 million times to understand it, this happened on March 14th:

Getting ready to put the sleeves on waste yarn after knitting only 6 repeats of the raglan increase pattern (pattern calls for 7 1/2 repeats). I am concerned about having enough to go around my upper arms for the sleeves, (should have listened to that inner voice!) but I don’t want the neckline creeping up any higher, I may end up ripping some out if it seems to high to do less raglan increases. We’ll see how it goes! Later: Yup, as feared the collar was much too high so I frogged back to 5 raglan increases, I’m afraid if I drop it to 4 repeats the bra straps would show and that’s just tacky!