At the dawn of the final day of the knitalong, I was determined to finish the machine-knit portions of the build. That means making the front panel, seaming the front and back along one shoulder, rehanging the neckline, and knitting the collar.
The front panel is constructed about the same as the back panel, but with differences in the neck and shoulder shaping. Compared with my rough go of it on the back panel, the front panel went much easier. I found myself tripping over the combination of working the pattern and switching yarns for the colored stripes. And I'm afraid that no one on Earth knows exactly how the stitch and row counts on the arm hole and neck actually shaping turned out. Future me will, unfortunately, become the one to solve this puzzle.
Great success up to the arm hole bind off!
I played gravity chicken with the cast-on comb and weights and, unfortunately, they were near touching the ground just as the pattern called for the long series of decreases for arm hole shaping. I was able to hang the regular cast-on comb, but it added some complication with moving those stitches. If I had to do it again, I'd make sure to re-hang all the weights 10 or so rows before that.
Yarn (and my stress levels) under tension as I work the left neck and shoulder.
I also regret being precious and/or clever with managing the out-of-work yarn. To keep down the number of ends to work in, I let the out-of-work yarn float from one section to the next. For straight sections, I should be able to hide the floats in a seam. For areas with decreases and bind-offs, I should have just snipped yarn and worked in the ends as I went. I think I'll be cutting and adding extra yarn to several floats that ended up being pulled shorter than the stitches they are meant to hide among. 😩
Looks like a body panel of a sweater!Hanging it on my body has me worried about the arm hole depth, but we march onward!
With breaks for food and stretching, it took me about 4 hours to get through this body panel. With my other obligations for the day, I don't think I'll be able to finish the neckline tonight. But, hey, there's always tomorrow!
I'm not super confident in how this is gonna turn out, but I'm proud that I've pushed through so far! Plus I got to try draping all the major pieces on!
In the first installment of this series, I made some sleeves, putting me well on time for the knitalong. Since then, however, I spent two weeks in Berlin, a few days sick, and some days catching up on work. All that adds up to: the knitalong is already practically over! 😱
However, I can't let that get me down. It's not homework, there's no grade. I just want to practice some skills, learn some new ones, and make producer Amy a nice sweater. So, let's cast on and get back to it.
The second video in the knitalong series is on body panels. I started with the back. A process that was meant to look something like:
Cast on 1x1 rib and knit the bottom hem.
Transfer stitches to the main bed and knit the body (a long rectangle of plain knitting).
Shape the arm holes by binding off some stitches, then decreasing for a bunch of rows.
Shape the shoulder and neck by working one side at a time.
Because I'm working this sweater with a pattern of stripes, I peppered the printed instructions with the row count and color for each color change. This would become important when switching "sections" of pattern that restart the row counter to 000, and doubly important for the shoulder shaping, which has to be worked twice.
Tough to see in black yarn, but here's a ribbed hem for a body panel!
This was my first time casting on a 1x1 rib across almost the entire bed. I found it challenging to get the ribber's full-bed cast-on comb. In my first failed attempt the comb was one needle too far to the right and got caught on a piece of the machine. For the second attempt, one of the weights got stuck on a piece of my knitting machine stand, causing stitches on that side to bunch up and drop. Seen above: I finally got it right!
After transferring the stitches from the ribber to the main bed, it should have been smooth sailing for the main body. Unfortunately, working the striped pattern proved challenging with so many stitches on the bed. The area for "parking" the non-active yarn ends up under the carriage, making it easy to tangle and create long loops. And, oh no-
Dropped about half the stitches off the bed during a color change. 😭
Just over halfway through the main body, after switching colors and, I SWEAR, checking that the new yarn was properly in the carriage feeder, I dropped off a ton of stitches.
Thankfully, this was recoverable, if tedious.
Remove all weights from the work.
Carefully remove the work from the machine.
Go back to the last row of the previous color stripe and re-hang the live stitches. At 185 stitches this was quite tedious!
Reset the row counter to match.
Hang a cast-on comb and some weights.
Resume knitting, redoing the stripe that was dropped. It will be removed after taking the piece off the machine.
The new, somewhat ridiculous, weight configuration. Photo taken after several successful stripes.The more recent rows of stripes. The ribber sure gets in the way of photos!
That was, thankfully, the only major disaster.
When I made it to shoulder bind-off, I pulled up the knitalong video to start double-checking steps. The bind-off went fine. The reductions for the shoulder holes was made more complicated by needing to switch colors in the middle, but went pretty okay!
Ready for neck and shoulders. Lolly cat is staring because I'm wearing a neck light and moving lights cannot be trusted.
At this point, it was time to work the shoulders one at a time. I referred to the video multiple times. I goofed up and dropped some stitches that I was thankfully able to recover. I took it slow and sweat the details. I nodded along at the concept of short rowing on two sides as I watched the video a 5th and 6th time. I ver-ry care-ful-ly bound off stitches. I counted and recounted and still somehow ended up off-by-one stitch somewhere along the way.
But I finished! And I think it will be okay!
Test fitting by laying it on my back. Sure! Seems like a thing!I'm expecting this to relax and shrink up after washing!
I worked on this piece on and off all day, in between work and meetings and phone calls. I definitely putting in at least a few solid hours of work, mostly in recovering from mistakes. I wrapped around 10pm to write this post!
I'll be back at it tomorrow! My hope is to at least finish the front panel and the neckline and get a post online in time for the knitalong's Sunday show and tell. I'll still need to seam the final shoulder, sleeves, and sides, but I'll have finished the machine knitting part of it, and that should feel pretty good.
