Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Work in Progress Wednesday-OWLS

I have a love-hate relationship with this sweater.  Dear Daughter showed me a photo and requested it for Christmas - LAST Christmas.  Yes, that's right, Christmas of 2012.  I found the pattern on Ravelry (Owls by Kate Davies), and purchased it.  I measured her myself.  I could not find acrylic yarn in teal, the color that she wanted, so I used a double strand of worsted and played around until I got guage.  Then I got going - it is knit in the round from the bottom up, so it's a seamless garment.  Got to the armpits and then through both sleeves without any difficulty.  I did lengthen the sleeves like she wanted, joined them to the body, and got to work on the cute little cable owls.  She came home for Christmas, just as I was ready to do the neckline ribbing and tried it on.  It was perfect.  The hips were perfect, the front, the sleeves - everything she wanted.  The back, was gigantic - probably 8 inches too big.  We were both crushed.

After a suitable period of mourning, like two months, I took sweater out and considered how to fix the problem.  I was nonplussed.  If it was knitted in pieces, I would simply reknit the back.  If it did not have the cabled owl pattern, perhaps I could cut an 8 inch wide wedge of knitting out and sew it back up - if I was brave enough, that is, and I wasn't brave enough.  So, I ripped everything out except the sleeves and started over again, but not before I checked the guage of the poor, giant sweater - and it was off.  How could that be?  I knitted several swatches until I got perfect guage.  By this time, Dear Daughter had moved to the other coast, and I asked her to measure herself, since she had been eating healthily and exercising like a fiend, and had dropped a size or two.  Armed with the new measurements and a smaller, newly correct guage, I decided to drop one size and got to work.  I kept checking my guage throughout, and it is perfect.  I'm nearly done - I'm halfway through the owls.  But as I was laying it out to photograph it this morning, it looked quite small to me...   Yup.  The hips are 31 instead of 34, and the body seems short.  I don't have the heart or the time this morning to measure it.