Wednesday 13 October 2010

Chronicles of failure

No, it's not my complete authorised autobiography. Just a piece of knitting.

I started a sweater in February. Big bulky sweater. It was winter, after all. I happily knitted and knitted and then I ran out of yarn. I saw it coming so I decided to save yarn by adding a bit of waist shaping, thus narrowing the garment at a certain point. Still I was worried that there might not be yarn enough so I located someone's skein of said yarn being offered for sale at a reasonable price. Meantime there was summer, other stuff to do than knit winter garments and a few days ago, I decided that I'd better get something done. I pulled the sweater out of the plastic bag where it was resting and because I wasn't absolutely sure about where the work stalled, I tried the half-sweater on. It felt oddly big, there was a big chunk missing in the front but I still could wrap it around like a cardigan. Then I started turning around in the mirror to find that the waist shaping is nice but in the area of my buttocks.



see the flare at the dress form's hips? That should have been the waist. Not pretty

I wanted to set up the whole thing on the dress form to see how it looks like with the newly added contrasting insert and although it's not finished yet, I was quite happy.


The sweater is friggin' big but most of it is already blocked so it shouldn't stretch anymore but for the front insert in green and yellow-green (that's why the front is crooked, blocked and unblocked bits of fabrics have met). It's only pinned together so that the edges of the fabric wouldn't roll apart. Also, it's heavily pinned on and around the mannequin. Further measuring showed that I made it way too wide. Maybe 15cm.



See? To make the sweater look halfway decent from the front, I had to fold the fabric over quite a bit. Admittedly, the mannequin is much smaller than me and I do it often but normally I only tuck the fabric in a bit, it's not folded twice.

Dear readers, the question you ask now, I believe, is: what the hell I was measuring. And what the hell I was thinking. Now, the answer is that I have no clue.

1 comment: