theraineysisters knitting and so much more

Am I the only one who gets bored at the start of the second sleeve? That’s where I am on the Berry Cluster pullover. I was hoping to be at the “sewing pearls on the clusters” stage of the sweater today, but I am not. Part of the problem, besides the fact that I am a slow knitter, is that I needed to pick up the neck three times and knit it twice.

The directions have you pick up about 90 stitches around the neck, which means that you can’t leave live stitches on the back and front necks because you would have far too many stitches. I picked up the neck as instructed, knit a few rows, and didn’t like how it looked. It was too obvious where stitches were skipped on the pick up. (I don’t have a photo of this.) I think it probably works fine if you use the fuzzier yarn called for in the pattern, but with my very smooth yarn there was nothing to hide the pick up.

On attempt number two, I went ahead and picked up into every stitch on the front neck. The pick up looked much better, but I knew there would be too many stitches and the neck would be too wide. I tried to compensate for that by having a series of decreases at four places around the neck (evenly distributed with respect to the shoulder). The neck looked fine, but it was still too wide at the very top.

I had two main options at that point. The first option was to start again with the higher number of stitches, but do more decreasing. I realized that to make the decreasing work, I wouldn’t be able to restrict the placement of the decreases the way I had on this attempt. I was afraid that decreasing at even intervals all around the neck wouldn’t look very nice and I decided I was too lazy to figure out a decorative decrease placement. The second choice was to pick up the specified number of stitches, but find a way to hide the pick up. So, I did the pick up again and then immediately did a purl row.

I think that worked fairly well.

A side note re the sleeve cap:

Because I am using a finer yarn than called for, my row gauge is “off.” Instead of 28 rows per 4 inches, I am getting closer to 31 or so. That’s not a problem for the most part because the pattern gives most of the directions in inches (e.g., 8 inches for the armhole). However, on the cap directions for the fitted sleeve, the directions are given for a set number of rows. If I followed the directions exactly, I would have had 55 rows total in the sleeve cap, which would be the 8 inches needed if my row gauge was correct. However, I knew that I had knit 64 rows from the first armhole decrease to the shoulder. With 55 rows, my cap would have been too short. Knowing that in advance, I slipped in a few extra rows here and there so that I had a total of 62 rows. I basted the sleeve into the sweater to make sure the sleeve length was right and the cap fit perfectly. Because fitted sleeves can be tricky, I think it always pays to look carefully at the directions for both the sleeve and the body to make sure that you compensate for any gauge issues.

Oh! I was going to save the yarn I used for my first neck attempt and use it for sewing. I’m not going to now. Here’s why:

(This is Eightball, a Chihuahua puppy who visits us occasionally and apparently can tell the expensive yarn from the cheap stuff.)