1100%

That is approximately the amount by which our subliminal advertising campaign increased our blog comment traffic. There must be something to it after all…
St Enda is finished.

It really turned out to be a cozy, well-fitting sweater.

It didn’t come out perfectly according to plan (of course), and I think the main reason for that is that I did not go so far as to wash and block a swatch before I made my measurements. If I were to undertake such a major redesign of a sweater’s shaping again, I would make a big swatch and wash it before measuring my gauge. But it’s not too bad.

The shoulders are a little too wide. Although it lies ok thanks to a good block, the shoulders still drop a tad. You can see that my shoulder ends approximately at the single column of knit stitches, but that the shoulder seam is a but further out than that. But the big benefit is in the absence of all that baggy bunching under the arms and over the upper arm that happens so often with a plain saddle. I’d say this was a success.

Here’s the business area of things.

You can see where I did a little steek for the neckband, and where the shoulder decrease line lay. See that vertical line of knits? That’s where the shoulder decrease line should have lain. Oh well, only 9 stitches off.

I also made a neckband facing instead of just casting off the neckband, because it makes a much nicer neckline. I did K1P1 ribbing on the inside and tacked down the live stitches. I turned it just a tad too far under, but I didn’t want ribbing to peek out at the top of the patterned neckband, so I erred on the side of caution.

I neglected to take a picture of how I finished the tops of the saddles, so here is where you get to practice having “the vision thing.” Here is a detail of the main cable motif, which runs up the saddles.

I closed off the center of the motif at the top of the saddle but still had about 10 rows to go before I had used up all the body stitches. So instead of opening up a new center motif that would just be stopped in midstream, I took those two outside bits and crossed them over the top of the closed motif. It actually finished things off nicely. Maybe I’ll remember to take a picture of that next week.

I used 12 or 13 balls of Berroco Bluefaced Leicester (discontinued, unfortunately – this is one great yarn), size 6 and 7 needles (one down from what Al*ce S called for in Aran Knitting), and it took from March 17th to May 17th. That is pretty fast for me to knit a complete adult sized sweater. I think I was just compelled by the shaping changes and wanted to push ahead to see how it worked out. I would definitely do this again.

I’ve put my Flower Basket back at the front of my knitting queue, now, so it’s progressing again, and I’m nearly done with Emily’s neon rainbow socks. I’ve discovered that I need to go against conventional wisdom on sock toe shaping to make a truly good fit for her funny little squared-off toes, so I do the every-other-row decreases but don’t then do any every-row decreases. It looks very strange until I put it on her foot and then it looks – well, like it was made for her. Imagine that.