Neck Trek

A few years ago I went through all my projects and finished, frogged, or tossed them all. I have been mostly monogamous since then. I like finishing things.

For a few reasons, I have strayed from that habit. I currently have three adult sized sweaters on the needles and a few baby/child sized projects in mind.

Last week two sweater bodies were at the neck stage and I discovered earlier a problem with the neck from a previous sweater. Thus, last week was neck week.

The problem neck was from the Milo sweater I made a few years ago. Not only was it too tight, but there was a dropped stitch right at the base. You can see the before and after pictures below. I probably ought to reblock it and give those rib stitches a yank. They look kind of sloppy.  I'm super glad that I still had a bit of that dark blue in the stash.

The Drops project was next. Alas, I did not take a photo of it with the neck, and I don't feel like taking out the sweater and the camera again, so a neckless body will have to do for today.

I also began a sweater in a yarn called Brilla purchased from Elann in my binge-purchase days. It is a cotton/rayon mix and is decent to work with. I became obsessed with a pattern called "Mulberry Grid" from Knitters magazine that came out while I was living outside of the U.S. I was able to backward-engineer the pattern so I could try making the little jacket. Since I have a limited amount of material and no reliable way to get more I started with the body and cropped it a bit. I feel that I have enough skeins to make full-length sleeves.

I was pleased with how fast the body of this sweater worked up. Logically, it makes sense since it is mostly big holes. If anyone is looking at this blog and wants to know how I did it I will discuss it here. You would have to leave a comment.

These two green beauties should be finished up in March.

So Much Math

I made this sweet bunting many years ago. Since I'm in a baby sweater mode, I decided to make another. Well, this is not entirely because of the recent baby sweater obsession. I'm considering how to make this into an adult design.

I'm glad I reworked it according to pattern. One of the things I dislike about yoke sweaters is the need to do short-rows to work the back of the neck, or fiddle with calculations to create a nice dip in the front. When I blocked this, I realized that the zig-zag of the yoke pattern naturally creates a neck dip. I'm thinking that short rows to fill in some of the back can work very nicely.

The next part of this project will be to chart it. I'm not so good a visualization, especially when it comes to lace. The directions are seventy-something rows of line by line directions. A chart will help me a lot.

Next, I need to decide what to do with the body and arms. The first time I worked the project, I continued the lace. This lace does have bias, and I recall not being entirely pleased with the result. Perhaps a line of yo below the last repeat, then moving back to stockinette would be better. I'll have to work some swatches to figure out how that will work.

Last, what weight yarn? This one is in sport weight. The weight is very nice, but I will need to make sure the increases calculate out properly. My next stash objective is the DK stuff and I think I have enough magenta and enough red to make an adult sweater in either color.

I'm not ready to put pencil to paper and work out all those decisions right now.

In the mean time, I'll go back to my current active project. It is an openwork cardigan and looks like a mess right now. Perhaps next week I will have the body completed and will be able to block it out and see how well my gauge swatch matches what I ended up with.

Mittens!

I'm enjoying these little projects. Oddballs are getting smaller. I suppose I could have made these adult size, but I have not made mittens for a very long time. I was looking through some of my vintage pattern books and this pattern pulled me in.

I'm switching back to baby sweaters and continuing to work on the larger Drops project.