“Lucky” is “finished”
… and I am, shall we say, “dissatisfied” with the results*.
I’d planned this to have zero ease, but that didn’t happen very much. Except in the sleeves.
Finished Lucky v1.0 had an extended side tie. Pardon the flamenco-poses here, but I am trying to show the amount of RAW UNADULTERATED CINCH required to tie this sweater on. Also, I’ve always found surplice-style garments a bit touchy, because you have to hit the waist just right to avoid the bottom hems diagonalizing themselves weirdly; just right did not happen here.
To correct this, I ditched the tie, added buttonholes, overlapped the two fronts more to narrow the sweater. It looked really acceptable! for three hours. Then it grew.
The problem, incidentally, was not really with the pattern drafting. There are a number of predictable-in-hindsight factors contributing to the big fat ‘meh’ that is this sweater:
1) Yarn sprawl. Heck, I’m not totally sure that I even knit this quite to gauge.
2) In the year it took me to knit this, I changed shape.
3) I have a longstanding suspicion that most knitters design for a person with vastly different proportions than I have (ref. fig 154).
I’m sort of kicking myself, because if I’d just converted the pattern to top-down raglan, knitted the sleeves simultaneously at the right proportions, and tried on as I went, I’d probably have a sweater that was only slightly too large and was the same nice proportionate too-large all around. It would fit my shoulders better, too. Kids, if you do not live in a pineapple under the sea, learn to make a top-down raglan in your size and shape. You can fake pretty much anything you want as a top-down raglan.
I don’t know whether to unravel this and fix it, or just cry into it.
Anyway, here is the Ravelry link to the project, but I’m not yet updating the entry until I get a decent photo showing that this sweater looks nearly acceptable if left unbuttoned.
*I need to clarify that my hair looks that way because it is wet. I did not dunk it in olive oil before posing for this picture.
