February Ladies' Sweater Challenge

Really it's me challenging myself to actually complete knitting one thing for myself. 

Normally I knit small things such as doll or baby sweaters.  Mittens and hats are my speed, and even some scarves and shawls.  Not too big an investment of time because I tend to get bored before they're finished.  Right now I'm looking at my yarn stash and I can see three or four works in progress that need some sort of finishing.  One just needs the side seams sewn, for goodness sake!  You'd think I could do that much...

So when I found Ravelry.com, and all of those lovely project photos, many with FREE patterns available for the download, I said to myself -- YOU can do this!  Start to finish, maybe not in one calendar year, but before you're too old to wear a nice sweater, you CAN knit one!  An adult size!  Come ON -- just do it!

I cast on the starting number of stitches and happily knit along in garter stitch (knitting every row, right and wrong sides), doing the increases to turn the corners at each of the raglan sleeve lines.

Once it got large enough to get my arms through what will be the sleeves, I started the lace pattern.  It's over four rows and seven stitches.  The pattern forms these nice leaves.

Of course there was a problem from the get-go, because I could not get my fingers to do the left-leaning decrease.  Knit two together?  No problemo!!  But slipping and back loops and psso and all that jazz, I couldn't do it while counting rows and stitches, so I just knit two together for every decrease.  The pattern looks just a tiny bit different than the actual knitting, but if anyone is close enough to see that, we had better be engaged!

Then of course there was the error or should I say there were multiple errors knit in.  And Frog Stitching (ripit, ripit) and reknitting.  I swear I should have the lace pattern memorized, since I knit so much of it!!

Then there was the hole, and the tear down... I pulled out 21 rows of the seven stitches where I did the yarn-over above the other yarn-over and knit in a gigantic hole.  Yes, lace IS holes, but this one dwarfed the others around it!

big hole... just begging everyone to look at it!!

Preparing to un-knit 21 rows of the pattern so I could reknit them on some short needles.

I reknit the offending 7 times 21 stitches, carefully counting rows, and turning my work so the purl rows on the wrong side would be knit as purls.  When I got back to the top, I should have been ready to knit those seven in pattern.  I should have ended on a purl row.  Seven purl stitches, no yarn-overs in the bunch.

I did not.

Instead I had a knit row, with knit tog's and yo's.

Oh dang!

If you look very closely you can see right in the center of this picture where the pattern takes a slight jog; everything looks good to the left, and it looks good to the right, but down the center, not so much.

At this point, it was after 10 p.m.  I decided that I was taking a bigger risk tearing those stitches out again and redoing them a third time than just leaving the whole mess alone.  After all, will anyone notice it while I'm galloping by on a horse?  Or is it if THEY are galloping by on a horse?

Regardless, I am leaving in the booboo.  Only God is perfect, and I am not going to try to pretend otherwise!

Besides, I have only about 4 inches to go before I'm done with the sweater body and can get started on the sleeves.

These items are soooo much easier to knit...

Have a great day!  Knit on...