Change of Pace

On Monday I start my new job with Brooklyn College. I am excited about the position and the office I'll be working with, but this is going to mark a drastic change in pace for me. I can't wait because quite frankly, I've been getting restless at home. I think the changes will be positive for everyone except the few avid followers of this blog. I imagine I'll be posting less, and the content might not be as knitting focused as it currently is. This prediction is based on my expectation that I won't be knitting as much, but you never know. I will have about an hour to commute and maybe since I'll be riding the subway away from Manhattan, I'll have some knitting time there. We'll just have to see, but I thought you deserved a warning.

Now for the fun stuff:

Since I accepted the position on Thursday, I didn't have to dedicate any of my normal time to job hunting yesterday or this weekend. I've reallocated all of that time to catching up on podcasts (I am still way behind since I didn't listen to any the week after thanksgiving) and working on my Christmas cardigan. I don't expect it to be done by Christmas, but I know that I have two days off next week and two days off the week after. I am hoping to get the bulk of the knitting done during these times so maybe I can set aside a weekend for seaming and another for the button band and shoulder flap.

Before you get too excited by my productive sounding plans, I should warn you that I am facing a full sweater frogging. I finished the back yesterday, and I blocked it this morning. Blocking is really the part of this project that I've been most worried about. Up until this point, I've been blocking things just to give them a nice bath and a finished look. The dimensions of my blocked items haven't been vital. This time, if the sizes aren't the same, the pieces aren't going to seam together right. So, while I was consumed in the worries that my haphazard blocking is going to get me in trouble, I neglected to worry about other things.

I finished the back of the sweater yesterday, and I blocked it this morning. to my dismay, it was stretched way too long. I managed to schunch it up into the proper measurements, I don't know how much of the schunching is too much. The width is fine, but none of the lines lengthwise really look clean or straight. (I'm sorry the picture is bad, my blocking space is not well lit.) I'm pretty confident that the weight of wearing it, is going to pull that length back out. So, I've been battling all morning with the options of frogging now, or waiting and potentially frogging the entire thing. I think I've decided to trudge on. I realize that if I finish the entire thing, I'll be less likely to frog it, and less likely to wear it if it fits poorly, but I have a lot of reasons to think it might be ok even with the extra length (there is a little YarnHarlot inside my head telling me that those will be marked as my famous last words). First, the width is good, so conceptually, the sweater should still fit, just be longer. Second, I made the smaller size, so a little bigger might be to my benefit. Third, I already cut an inch off the bottom, so if the added length makes it fall at the widest part of my hips that is undesirable but not disastrous. Fourth, even before the extra inch was cut, the bottom didn't reach the widest part of my hips yet so there is even more room to play with. Fifth, this is my first pieced together sweater, so I don't know what kind of stability seaming in the sleeves (which will have a width dimension that matches this length dimension) will give to the sweater. Sixth (and finally), I have absolutely no idea how to fix it if I do frog it. It is not the main body of the sweater that I am worried about, but section from the arm pit up. That section doesn't have any knit to X" long directions in it so I am uncertain about where I could cut anyway. I realize that I could decrease faster to make it shorter, but that would change the angle and the shape so the sleeves might not fit anymore.

Well, all of that just made me more confident. Did it convince you? I am going to keep going, and if in the end it was the wrong call, hopefully, I will have learned enough about this type of sweater that I can come up with a plan to adjust it. In the meantime, maybe I'll keep my eye out for some top down patterns just in case.