Finished Object Dance

The Sockotta sweater is done, though it hasn't been blocked yet. I'd been angsting over the color varigations and how they would show up. I'm happy with the body, though the sleeves gave me a bit of trouble. It seems the period of the color repeat pretty much matches the 86 stitches going around the top of the sleeves, creating vague vertical stripes that rippled upwards. I ripped the first sleeve and wound up trying the use two skeins in alternation trick to break up the clumping. It worked, sort of. The title is from Himself's comment on Thursday evening, trying to assure me that others don't see what I am/was convinced is horrific. Now that I look at the photos of it on, rather than just laying flat out, I'm not seeing the stripes I thought were there, but noticing much more the interplay of the black areas with the color snippets.

I haven't really worn this yet, since as soon as it was finished Boston finally got cold weather. This sweater is intended for 30 - 50 degree weather, and we've been in the teens and twenties before windchill. I'm generally happy with the fit, though I recognize that the sleeves are likely to lengthen. This sweater will probably relax a bit once it gets worn and washed, but I don't think it's going to get too far out of whack. Then again, Sockotta has a high cotton percentage and I'm not used to working that fiber.

I liked working with the Sockotta and liked this colorway. The sweater is meant to be a light-weight basic, go with everything casual. The black has a thread of white running through it, and then short bright colors at regular intervals. I worked it at 6.4 stitches to the inch on size 3s (3mm). I normally make my sweaters to mid-40 inches around, since this was a lighter gauge sweater I brought it in to 41 inches for the key number. It's an EPS saddle shoulder following the instructions in Knitting Workshop, with two modifications. One was starting the sleeves with 25% of key, rather than 20%, since I have thick forearms (or, as my massage therapist put it, I've developed muscles you can't feel on most folks). The other was the 10% difference between initial cast on and ultimate body circumference. Instead of increasing all the stitches at once in the last round of the ribbing, instead I increased half there and spread the other half up the sides gradually over a few inches. This keeps there from being quite such a poof of increased stitches immediately over the hips.

I'm surprised at how relatively little yarn this used. It weighs 9.6 ounces all finished, which multiplies out to roughly 1,140 yards. I have lots left over from the 4 100 gram skeins -- the extra coming from trying to get the sleeves to not stripe. Math of 9.6 ounces divided by 3.52 ounces per skein says I should have used 2.7 (rounded) skeins, so I probably could have gotten away with 3 skeins if I hadn't had the varigation problem. Having bought a 10 skein bag, I'm going to have to think about what to do with the rest.

My next big think is the same dimension saddle shoulder with Regia 4-ply sock yarn. This time I've got a 10 skein bag again, but they're 50 gram skeins. I'm still swatching this weekend. I started with a size 2 needle (2.75mm) but have switched to a size 1 (2.25 mm). It's making that much firmer of a fabric and I think I like it better. Just need to do more length to the swatch to get a good enough sample to measure for gauge.

No progress recently on the Baby Surprise Commuting Jacket. I'm debating if upsizing it by doubling the yarn is making it too big to carry in my briefcase, so I need to look at that. In the meantime, I'm finishing up the Cherry Tree Hill supersock Northern Lights socks as commuter knitting, not that they've made much progress either. The commuting fairies have not been sending sufficient trains through the tunnels recently to prevent platform buildup and keep seats on the trains free. Maybe it's their way of saying I've done enough charity knitting and need to build up my balance muscles again.