I should have learned the first time.
I thought I HAD learned the first time.
But no, I went charging ahead, without checking back in with EZ, thinking “I know what I’m doing. I’ve make sweaters before. I’ll just string these parts together on a big long circular needle, and get on with it.”
And then at some point last week I stopped and picked up the book again.
The percentages. I’d forgotten all about the dag-gone percentages.
And as it turns out, my “eyeballing it” method for the underarm join just didn’t cut it. So I’ve ripped back, and am going for a do-ever. Thankfully I was only about 4 rows into the shoulders when I made the decision. So it doesn’t hurt too bad.
Last time I didn’t realize my mistake until it was too late to rip back- and I had to improvise.
Now, I’m a fairly creative improviser, but I had to undertake extraordinary measures to fix the last EZ seamless saddle shoulder project I attempted. In that case, I had “fudged” the shoulder width a bit. That resulted in the sleeves sitting out too far, and being impossibly wide because they were not properly inset.
I had already cut the steeked neckline before I realized my error, so at that point, to make it wearable by a normally proportioned human, it was either
1. unravel and discard the handspun yarn back to before I started decreasing for the Vneck (!!!) or
2. figure out a way to make a dart in the arm after I’d already gotten to the saddles for the shoulders.
Guess which I did.
Yep. I figured out how many total stiches I needed to remove from the sleeves by the time I got to the shoulders, then I dropped back stitches until much of the upper arms was a mess of crinkly un-knitted yarn, and re knitted only as many stitches in each row as I needed per the rescue plan. ( I should have kept better notes on this process, or documented with photos, but at the time, I was a bit distressed and just wanted to put it behind me.)
Then I gathered up the extra yarn from each row that was no longer taken up with stitches and collected it along the inside centerline of the sleeve, making sure the recreated stitches were all even in tension and such.
Then, I cut each yarn in the center (except maybe the first one or two, which were really quite short) and wove the ends into the neighboring stitches.
Yes. Wove them in.
I don’t even remember how many ends. Too many to count. Both directions. Each row.
So, now the upper sleeves on this sweater are Seriously Reinforced. And the sweater is wearable. Not perfect, but wearable. Which is good, because I spun a whole little border leicester fleece to make it.
It was a painful victory.
And I think I learned my lesson.
I ripped back, didn’t I?