Head West, Finished Object!

Details here. Or, if you're a Ravelry beta tester, you can find it there.

After much procrastination I finally finished this sweater for my niece and nephew (twins). I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I've posted before about the blocking/assembly difficulties I had with it, but it's over now, and I just want to pop it in the mail and send it off before they grow out of it.

So Much Progress, So Few Posts (Oops!)

One finished Embossed Leaves sock:
I'm very pleased with this pattern. It's fun and it's going quickly. I also think I picked a great yarn.

Progress has also ocurred on the Diamond-Seed Baby Jacket, as have technical difficulties.
See how the sleeves seem a lot wider than the armscyes? Yeah. I have reasons (who shall remain nameless) to believe they aren't going to fit all that well. I was very happy with this pattern until assembly started. I am however, still very happy with the yarn, Dale of Norway Baby Ull. It's soft and has a slight sheen. Now that the sweater is blocked it has a lovely drape. The yarn is made for babies, but the palette is not all pastel, so I'll consider it for future work for myself.

I've also been making stitch markers:
These are made with split rings,

and these are made with jump rings I clumsily soldered shut then filed smooth. Functional, but not good enough to share with others.

Can you believe neither Hobby Lobby nor Michael's had appropriately-sized split rings? I didn't want to drive all over the metro looking for a bead shop*, so I just ordered some from Fire Mountain (along with more beads, hee!) But still...

*At B&N Wednesday night Liesl filled me in on some local spots to check out, so in the future I'm better armed. Yellow Pages, why do you fail me?

And the big project I've been working on has no pictures. I keep a spreadsheet of potential projects and some pictures of them on my PDA. Lately they've been neglected, and I wanted to improve the quality of the pictures (something happened when they were uploaded; I had to figure it out and fix it.) This has taken a lot of time, but I'm nearly done. I need to move the computer from the dining room table back to my desk to use the scanner to get some photos I don't have and that is just too much work. It's all about getting organized and immersing myself in my hobby again. As much as I love it and it's omni-present in my life, it does take a little bit of watering and pruning which I have neglected as of late.

Now for the fun part --
I've decided that I am going to alternate making a baby sweater with a sweater for myself. So now that I'm nearly done with the above baby sweater I need to pick a sweater for myself. I can't decide between these two:

This is from Vogue Knitting, and I bought the yarn from Elann summer of 2004. It has tenure.


And this is some Old School Cotton-Ease in pink for this sweater.
I bought this yarn summer of 2005.

Both will make nice summer sweaters for work. Both are made from cotton, so hand stress will be even. The Scoop du Jour has more mindless bits and I enjoyed the last pattern I used from Bonne Marie. I just can't decide. What do you think?

I'm Not Perfect?

Everybody's favorite, right? Blocking pictures!

I really do love this part. If you asked me while I was in the middle of pinning and measuring and stretching and adjusting, I'd tell you I hate it. But it's maybe my favorite phase of a project. It's where everything is made perfect and flat and ready for finishing. The end is near. The tedium is over. It's almost as exciting as starting the project.

Unless it goes as well as this project's blocking did.

It started just like any other blocking does. I assembled my blocking board and protective plastic tarp. I found the Altoids box of pins. I made sure the pattern included a good schematic. I wetted the pieces and rolled the excess water out in a towel. I laid the largest piece out on the grid and pinned the left edge down.

Then I counted out the specified width on the blocking board grid, and found it was at least two inches shy of the actual width of the piece.

Now, I'm certainly an experienced blocker, and I know that the whole point of blocking it to make the piece stretch and contract into its prescribed shape and size. But two inches (at least!) too wide was more than I felt I could smoosh into place. I fudged it and made a compromise between the schematic and the sweater, and did the best I could. It looked ok in the end. (See above) So the twins will not wear the sweater this fall, or next spring, but instead to their first day of kindergarten, so what?

I blamed myself.

I didn't wash my swatch. And I knew that superwash wool would stretch out. I just didn't bother to use that knowledge. If the sweater buckled and stretched when it was washed because the pieces didn't fit together right, it would be because I didn't take the time to do it right. Should I re-knit it?

When I got home from work today I unpinned the main piece and folded it into its future sweater shape.

See anything wrong?


How about if I do this?

The seed stitch button plackets should overlap and align. Everything else aligns -- the shoulders, the arm scyes. The stitch pattern doesn't seem to be stretched out there in the front. What's going on? How could only the fronts be too wide and not the back? This is not a gauge issue anymore.

So I went back to the schematic, and I checked it with a calculator against the prescribed gauge. I checked the back width against the front width, and indeed, if following the directions, which I did, you will get a two inch overlap in the front instead of the 3/4" overlap you need. The schematic doesn't actually correspond to the measurements you get when calculating with the gauge. Metric too. Both are wonky. Wonky galore. Interweave has no corrections to this pattern either.

So now what? I'm not sure how much it matters. When a child is actually wearing this sweater, will it matter that it overlaps too much when flat? I'm not convinced that it's worth cutting and sewing, and I'm definitely not convinced it's worth the time to re-design and re-knit.

I'm going to search the Internet for others who have made this pattern and see how it worked for them. In the meantime, I fully expect you to bestow on me the fullness of your wisdom. Please.

[Update: The finished Diamond Seed Baby Jackets I found around the Internets probably weren't blocked. That's all I have to say about that.

I'm re-blocking it to my calculated measurements, plus some adjustments to make the back wider. Stretch, smoosh, stretch, smoosh, pat, pat, pat.]