I was feeling rushed and self-congratulatory, and this is a bad combination. I was going to make my nephew a little birthday sweater, using a pattern I'd made five times before. I was cranking through it-- feeling invincible, feeling clever. I'd learned so much since I bought the pattern in 2004, when it seemed so much like a foreign language that I put it in storage for a few years. I'd learned so much since I first used it to make a baby sweater in 2007, when it seemed like alchemy to turn yarn into a garment. Why, look at that nifty little mirrored cable pattern I was improvising! Look at how fearlessly I was winging my stitch counts, since my gauge didn't line up quite right with the designer's!
[This is the part where the foreboding music would stop if this were a horror movie, leaving you with the silence in which you knew the bad guy would leap out of the closet.]
The bad guy in this particular closet? I realized last night that one sleeve is an inch longer than the other. I was in a hurry on Sunday morning, and in my haste to count the number of increase rounds on the first sleeve I completely misread my knitting. I started increasing too early and I stopped too soon.
Solutions I have considered and discarded:
- Ignore it. Let my SIL wonder if she is imagining that the sweater is slightly asymmetrical.
- Hurl sweater-in-progress onto compost heap with the vengeful vehemence born of vexation.
- Add another inch of ribbing to the bottom of the second sleeve.
- Cut an inch out of the first sleeve and sew it back together.
- Suggest a minor surgical adjustment to my nephew's left arm. (Maybe don't mention to my SIL that I thought her son ought to have his arm shortened so my sweater would fit better.)
Solution I will probably adopt:
- Take two circs and thread through the stitches in the section of the sleeve above the last increase, leaving one round between the two needles. Snip a stitch, unravel the round in between, knit an inch, and kitchener the two sets of live stitches all the way around.
Solution that might be faster:
- Frog back to the round where I joined the sleeve, and knit another inch before re-attaching it. This might be smarter, actually, because last night as I was trying to assess my options I tugged on one end of my circular needle and the cable pulled out of the join. ALAS. But I do not love re-knitting something I've already slogged through, particularly when there's nothing wrong with that particular whack of knitting.
What would you do, O gentle readers? I am 16 rounds into the yoke, if that helps you in your hypothetical decision-making. Do you have a solution I have not considered?
Verb. sap. (although this is most a verbum to Future Jamie, who may or may not qualify as sapiens): The fact that you can finish a pattern that bills itself as "EXTREME KNITTING" does not exempt you from making mistakes while COUNTING TO 9. Measure twice, knit once.
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