Knit Powers to Peace: it's over!

Monday, January 23, 2006

it's over!

It's finished!! I finished this a few nights ago, but it's been drying from it's bath in the sink. What a fun sweater! It came out fitting perfectly after I blocked out the sleeves to make them longer and blocked out the chest to make it a little wider.

Check out the button I got for her:

You can also see the keyhole in that picture. I ended up ripping out the original incorrect keyhole (just the picking up stitches part) and reknitting it. I decided to start on the same side I originally started on. My end was there, from my long tail cast on, so I was able to re-attach the yarn on that side. To fix the problem of the inside out purls and knits, I knit all the purl rounds and purled all the knit rounds. As a result, my decreases were on my purl rows, and I p2tog on either side of the marker instead of k2tog. Hope that makes sense. Let me know if it doesn't.

Speaking about re-attaching yarn, I used the Russian Join method of grafting the yarn together so I would have less ends to weave in. There were almost none! It was my first time doing this, and it really worked well with the Blue Sky Alpacas Cotton.

Here's a close-up of the bell sleeve:

Please disregard the fingers that are in need of a manicure.

I made another modification on the neck because of a big mistake I made. I messed up on the number of repeats for the keyhole, so it ended up a little smaller. I really liked how it worked out in the end, though. Now I don't have to wear anything underneath if I don't want, because the keyhole is small enough. I like that part. I had to change the picking up stitches part because of the mistake, so I picked up 10 instead of 12 for each section.

Also, I didn't like the holey paired decreases and increases, so on the sleeves I made sure to have a plain knit stitch between the pair. You can kind of see in the pictures that it closed up the looseness a little.

Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Cotton in color #623 Toffee
Needles: Bamboo size 8
Pattern: Angelica

One last thing: I used Anna's Button Loop Tutorial for the button hole at the top. It made such a clean beautiful button loop.

Thank you so much for all the inspiration and help! It was so motivational to see all the finished and nearly finished sweaters. Thanks Yahaira and Carrie for hosting the Knitalong! Happy Knitting, Everybody!