Well yes, there is knitting going on here.
I found myself between projects. I fell short of yarn in my supposedly current project, which was anticipated and wholly my own fault as i was knitting the recommended yarn at a gauge which was tighter than was recommended in the pattern. While I was waiting for additional supplies to arrive I needed something to work on.
Enter a few skeins of Road to China yarn by The Fiber Company in a lovely reddish purple color named "rose de France". I purchased this during an evening of hunting and pecking through the remaining stock at my LYS, Yarn Central, before they went out of business. There was not really enough to make a sweater, but I thought there was enough to do something. I was right, although just barely.
I had seven skeins. Seven 80-yard skeins yields 560 yards of yarn. Searching for patterns for an adult sweater using that little yardage yielded very little. Originally I considered a vest pattern which required a little over 600 yards, more than I had, but I thought I could risk it as I tend to knit long skinny stitches and fewer rows per inch means less yarn is used. But then I found this pattern, which was actually written for the yarn I was using and required the exact yardage I happened to have on hand: Bells of Ireland from Interweave Knits
That is, my yardage would work if I knit the smallest size, which produced a sweater with a 38" bust. This would technically fit my 37" inch bust, although the sweater shown is pictured with "several inches" of positive ease, which means, I guess that the model's bust is around 33 - 34.
I could work with that.
I made the smallest size. However I made some changes. This sweater, like most knitting patterns is designed so that the circumference around the sweater is divided equally between the front and back. This means that if a sweater is 38 inches at the bust, it is divided so that there 19 inches of width across the back, and 19 inches across the front. This might work if the person wearing the sweater is built like Gumby and is roughly the same front and back, but most humans aren't designed that way. Most of us are narrower across the back than we are across the chest. I thought that if I redesigned the pattern so that I had extra volume at the front to accommodate the fuller bust measurement I might be able to pull it off. I used my actual back measurement at the bustline for the back of the sweater and put everything else in the front. This did not affect the knitting significantly until I got to the raglan shaping where, luckily for me, the shaping was done over the course of a six-row repeat. Rather than decreasingly equally in the front and back, I needed to decrease three stitches in front for every one stitch decreased in back, a proportion that was easily worked out over six rows.
Of course, since the sweater is knitted in one piece from the bottom up, I wasn't going to know how well it worked until I was almost done. But I figured if the math was right it had to at least fit. Whether it would be flattering or not was another issue. I was going out on a limb here as I've never worn anything quite like this before.
Here are the results:
I think it works. Of course it appears substantially shorter on my tall 5'9" frame and long torso than it does on the model, although I can assure you the length exactly matches the pattern specs. It is not ideal, but it is not bad. I even think it would be rather nice over a simple dress. Unfortunately I don't have any simple dresses I could wear it with at the moment, a situation that probably needs to be remedied. I am actually happier with the style than I am with the striping and color changes across the sweater. I did check the labels and all the yarn was from the same dye lot, probably originally from the same bag, so I am wondering if the color varation is due to differences in light as the yarn was stored. I didn't see the color difference in the skeins before I started knitting, or I would have made an effort to work the color progression a little differently. I think I will wear it, at least for now. I'm wondering if the disappointment in the color will bother me over time, if it will be possible to over-dye it, or if I will just accept it as one of the many imperfections of life. Whatever I decide I can't complain about the results considering it was sale yarn and a couple of weeks worth of nightly television knitting.
