Work in progress Wednesday

Happy Wednesday!  Things are getting back to normal here.  We're able to sleep through the night without having to get up for medicine or changing dressings.  Sleep makes a huge difference.  My husband continues to improve, so all is good at home.

I've been working on my second Custom Fit Sweater.  For this one, I started with the Dansez pattern from Amy Herzog's book.  It has a lace pattern around the bottom edge, a scoop neck and elbow length sleeves.  I am using a DK weight, much lighter than what the pattern used.  So I used the software to recalculate based on my yarn and my measurements.  I'm up to the armholes of the back.  Doesn't look like much until you block the lace.

Her sweaters have a lot of shaping.  I have started marking decreases and increases with tiny rubber bands (my son's braces are off and we have tons of these around the house, you do have to cut them off later but they are easy to find and basically free until I run out of his stash).  You can see that there are vertical darts.

This one gives a close up on it.  You can see that there are actually three vertical darts for decreases - starting first with the one that is closest to the middle of the back, then going to the next out and just two decreases closer to the edge.  I had never seen this before (well my last sweater had two darts for decreases - but three?!?).  Amy's explanation for this is that when you have a big difference between hips and waist and have to do a lot of decreases in a short amount of space, it is best to do two or three vertical darts.  This way it will fit better, not pucker or gap in weird ways.  Since I have almost four inches of lace border, all the decreases before the waist have to be crammed in to a small space, therefore more vertical darts.  The top marker is actually where the increases start so you can see that it is just a small vertical area for the waist.  I'll keep you posted on how this works out and how it fits finally.

Last night was Night Knitting for our guild.  We didn't have a great turn out - time of year, people getting ready for school to start, etc… but we had a few.  I was helping someone with a pattern which was really poorly written.  They didn't want to use more than two pages so they skimped on the instructions.  It makes you really appreciate when designers put the time into writing clear instructions.  Especially when you are doing something for the first time like three sets of darts.

Head over to Tami's to see all the great projects.