Dirty Pictures

If I were not such a confident knitter, this picture:

would mean that I was ready to shape the shoulders, then join them, complete the neckband and start on the sleeves, trying to knit as fast as I could so that I finished the sleeves before the yarn ran out. 

Unfortunately I'm so self-assured in terms of my knitting that there are times when my planning is based more on boundless optimism than on anything useful such as actual gauge and measurements and stitch counts, which is all very well when I'm doing something modular or measure-as-you-go, but I get into trouble when I'm actually trying to duplicate a design and instead the only next step is this:

Sad but true.  

This is what those with a more puritanical bent than I might rightly call "yarn pornography". An uncomfortable picture. Shameful. No one should have to see this sort of filth, let alone pose for the pictures.

Of course this means that I can tweak the design to make it work better for me and my yarn.

I did learn that this handspun wool-silk blend knits up really nicely and that my dye job was pretty decent, although it's a bit, um, twiggy.  Lots of stuff no doubt fell out during processing, more fell out as I spun, and I'm having to pick out bits as I knit too. No matter, a small price.

The pattern instructions have you knit a longish 3x3 ribbed section for the body on the usual smaller needles, and then decrease radically (about 1/4 to 1/3 of the stitches) before starting on the stocking stitch section.  The reason for this must be that the ribbed section is a stylistic rather than a functional choice: it's not supposed to affect the shaping of the garment at all.   This is all very well and good, but it uses up a boatload of yarn which I can ill-afford.

My solution? Work a garter rib or a moss rib over the after-decreasing number of stitches for the same effect but more efficient yarn use.  I can carry this design element over to the cabled section as well, which has the additional benefit of avoiding the unevenness in the purl sections often emphasized by cables.

It's not as though I had absolutely no plan when I started (unlike my friend Pnina the techno-peasant from college days who decided to knit a dress and didn't count or even consider stitch counts or gauges but just cast on willy-nilly.  She appeared to have serious overcrowding issues on the needles, so I persuaded her to measure the width of her dress.  It was about the size of a luxurious bathroom with whirlpool bath and separate shower for two.  She was a size 4 perhaps) - after all, I did calculate widths and stitch counts, but did not seriously think about rates of decrease. With things like sleeves and body shaping, you often don't have to adjust the rates, as the rate of decrease (say every six rows) tends to give the same shape at different gauges - you just do more of the decreases or increases with thinner yarn than with thicker yarn, but 1:6 is the same ratio no matter the units.  

This principle didn't work so well here, especially since I gaily started increasing later than I should have, made the length disparity less extreme, and had to fudge the width due to the size of the repeat.  The thing is, the fat scarf-like section that gets decreased away to match the other side looked kind of clunky and awkward, probably in part due to the difference between my yarn and the original pattern yarn, which had more drape, so that this part should hang in folds rather than maintaining its width.  Not really all that attractive.  I think it might be better one repeat narrower, so that the decrease rate can be gentler, and if the bottom edge were angled too, that would make it more interesting and would de-emphasize the fact that the bottom edge actually doesn't hang entirely straight.

If you're the kind of person who checks the keywords at the bottom of blog postings, you'll see that even though I did have to rip out the ENTIRE thing, I did not include the word "failure" as a keyword.  This is because I don't actually regard this as a failure.  I wasn't entirely happy with all aspects of the project, so this very large, um, swatch has given me the insight I needed in order to obtain something that'll satisfy me.  Besides, it's thickish yarn and it's only a couple of weeks of effort.