I even bought a beautiful and quite expensive (at least I thought so at the time :) grey alpaca yarn for it, but I was a bit too afraid to use it. So I first tried the pattern with some really old old bordeaux red yarn from a sweater I had started in the 1980s and frogged (here's the Ravelry page of the project). I made quite a few mistakes when knitting it for the first time - some due to my lack of knitting experience other due to not reading the pattern :/
But I finished it and really liked the look of it - except for the curve of the lace collar. To make the lace collar fit, the pattern suggests: "to sew two small darts in the lace" and later after you've sewn it with your sewing machine to "clip the excess fabric about a quarter inch from the outer most seam line". Cutting into my knitting is something that I don't think I could ever do. So when I knitted the first one, I just sewed the collar to lay flat on my shoulders, but I didn't cut the excess. The picture on the right shows how that looked from the inside.So I resolved to use to use short rows to shape the collar - when knitting it again with my beautiful alpaca yarn. A project that I started soon after finishing the first sweater. I quickly did the main pieces (front, back and sleeves) - and then started the lace. It took me a few attempts to get a) the short rows and b) the curve right, but I guess I got it right in December 2012. And I know I knitted a piece of the collar on the train home after New Year's Day of 2013.
And then it became a WIP - a hibernating WIP. For a loooong time ...
I don't even know why I abandoned it, but this year (more than 5 years later, when I was going through a bit of an inspirational crisis :) I finally picked it up again and
- finished the lace collar (even though I had to try the lace pattern with the short rows a few times with scrap yarn)
- sewed up the pieces and
- inserted the lace collar.
As it may help somebody else who also wants to knit this lovely sweater, here are the modifications I did. More photos can be seen on my Ravelry project page.
Firstly, I didn't knit the pieces in the order as given in the pattern. I started from the hip and knitted the front and back piece together in the round. After ribbing, I put 12 stitches (in the middle of the front part on a stitch holder (or rather scrap yarn) and started to knit in rows. When reaching the sleeves, I devided it into two front and one back part, that I finished seperately.
But the major modification was knitting the collar in short rows, which I did as follows:
- Short row (ridge) for regular lace: (RS) k3, yo, p2tog, yo, p2tog, ktbl, turn (just a normal turn, no w+t), (WS) sl1, p1, k2, yo, p2tog, yo, p2tog, k1
Since this increases the stitch count by 1, in the next row I did a k2tog just over the gap, i.e. the two stitches I knitted together were the last stitch of the short row (RS) and the next stitch. If that next stitch was to be a k2tog (as stated by the lace pattern), I did a k3tog. - Short row (ridge) for reverse lace: (WS), k1, p2tog, yo, p2tog, yo k2, p1, turn, (RS) sl1, yo, p2tog, yo, p2tog, k3
As with the regular lace, this increases the stitch count by one, so I had to decrease by one in the following in row. And I did this also at the gap, where I did a p2tog instead of the normal p (as given in the lace pattern without short rows).
Since I rarely knit sweaters that are sewn up (for my own stuff, I prefer top-down raglan constructions, e.g. this one), I had a hard time inserting the sleeves. On YouTube I found these helpful videos:
- Seaming a Set-in Sleeve by BeroccoKnitBits
- Knitting Help - Setting in Sleeves by VeryPink Knits and
- Knitting Help - Mattress Stitch also by VeryPink Knits
Do you have a WIP that has been lying around for quite a while? If so, do you think you'll ever finish it?
By the way, the background picture of my blog (the grey knitted ribbing) is a photo of the ribbing of this project :) ... and it has been the background picture for more than five years.
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