8/12/2006

I've been knitting with great focus on my submission to Big Girls of late. Indeed, as of the end of July, when I realize that September 1 isn't really so very far away and they are running ads for shiny #2 pencils on TV (see how shockingly in touch with the world I am now that I have TV?), I had only the Front done and was in the black hole of "this will never, ever, ever get finished". I don't think it's giving too much away to say that it involves some mosaic work. But the result of that is that significant portions of the sweater are at a gauge of 7 sts and 12 rows per inch. Yes, I'm knitting the equivalent of sock gauge on size 10 needles! On a sweater with a 46" chest.

After considering bailing on the project and a peptalk from Jillian , I decided to treat it like a job. Or Olympic training. Concerted effort. Scheduling. Calisthenics for the wrists and thumbs. And some revamped design decisions. All for the good, mind you.

The Back is complete is remarkable time. With only short moments of celebration and the recogition that I will likely finish the sweater in the current era, I cast on for sleeve 1. It too is finished in remarkable time. But, as Ms. Clavell woud say "Somesing ees not right!". It looked a little funny while I was knitting it. It looked a little funny bound off. Funny in the orangutanish way, truthfully. So I blocked it. Smooth it out. A little long? Nah... it's a big sweater. (Okay, I'll just say for the record right now that I know that people who have big chests do NOT have longer arms. I understand that Da Vinci height = wingspan thing. Really. I was a tad delusional.) So what do I do? Stop there and face it? No, I stitched it in. I did not baste, mind you, I mattress stitched. Still looked funny. So I wove in my ends. That oughta fix it!

And then I faced up to it and feverishly ripped the sleeve down to just above the elbow. There will be less knitting on BOTH sleeves I rationalized. It was the right thing to do. But now what? Where was my mistake? Okay, 1) they were too wide and 2) they were too long, but there were other issues. These are not quite usual sleeves, so there's a lot to consider about where they hit the body and at what angle. Eventually, I resketched the front and back on graph paper and then made proto-sleeve cut outs and taped them on. A 3-D model. Really.

And now back to knitting.

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