Sleeves are finished! I have no pictures! This is going to be visually boring!
So yes, my Chambourcin sleeves are finished and probably done drying, I can unpin them when I get home. Reblocked the fronts as well, so now that’s done. All that’s left is the hood and the edging, and me being me, I’m diverging from the pattern a bit here.
See, I find that knitting necklines, or really, anything that is supposed to be added after the main knitting is complete and intact, to be really tedious and annoying. It’s a pain in the butt to be flipping the entire body of a sweater back and forth while you’re only working on 70 or so stitches. So I devised a work around that may be a little crazy but makes me happier overall.
I provisionally cast on the number of stitches that are on hold from my fronts and back pieces, and then worked a wrong-side row in pattern—this would have been my first step anyway, had I simply started knitting the held stitches. So I’m knitting the hood separately from the body, and then I will block it separately, and while that’s drying, I will put the body together—front and back shoulders, sleeves, front and back side seams—and then graft the hood onto the body. Not only does this eliminate the annoying back and forth of a full garment for a small amount of stitches, it also means I won’t have to block the entire body again just to open up the pattern on the hood.
I’m feeling pretty good about this plan, especially since I devised it when I couldn’t sleep Friday morning. I could be done with this sweater by Wednesday if I churn out the hood! The edging is simple garter stitch; I’ll still have to work back and forth with the entire body for that, but it’s only five or so rows, as opposed to 16″ of knitting the hood.
Have you ever created a workaround to avoid a part of knitting that’s annoying to you? I’m always on the look out for more clever workarounds.
