cimorene

Sweater Illustrations and Cat/Bunny Tax:

The Curséd Hoodie Sweater: lilac marled Zingiber by Susanna Wintour

My last update on this sweater hoodie was 9 days ago in a post called less than 100 stitches from the finish line, but I think I should detail the mishaps which have occurred in the production of this garment chronologically.
1. I ordered the yarn initially after moving into my MIL's side of our double-barrelled house (it's really a house with a second house grafted onto the side) in summer 2019, when our side of the house was being renovated and we were camping in the midst of 3 households' worth of stuff in stacks and piles on MIL's side. Then a pipe exploded in our basement and destroyed our hot water heater... and then the septic tank overflowed... and then MIL died so suddenly we didn't even have a chance to get all her passwords first. Somewhere in this chaos, the knitting got lost.
2. I found the knitting again in spring 2020 - still waiting for the estate to clear probate so we could finish renovating our side of the house (there was no kitchen or bathroom there for the intervening period, and also no heat). I knitted most of the pattern, then made an error in the major back lace panel that meant unraveling half the body and redoing it, but eventually finished in June 2020. Immediately ordered a zipper, which got lost in the mail. Ordered a replacement a month later.
3. The replacement zipper arrived and the estate cleared probate and work resumed on putting a kitchen and bathroom in our side of the house. In August-October of 2020 we entered a stage of FRANTICALLY trying to finish in time for our would-be tenant to move in before winter, and when we moved to our side several things went missing, including some of MIL's dishes and kitchen stuff, my favorite sweater, and the package containing the zipper.
4. So in August 2021 I gave up on finding the old zipper and ordered a replacement, and blocked the sweater, only to try it on and discover a moth-eaten hole had appeared near the center of the back; it was impossible to fix the hole without unraveling half the sweater, but it was slightly too tight anyway, and the lace pattern at the slightly looser gauge I had knitted it resulted in some really big and dramatic openwork holes down the back that would have been inconvenient and potentially chilly. With a heavy heart, I handed the sweater to waxjism for frogging (a knitter term for unraveling).
5. Also in August 2021, I cast on for a replacement hoodie using the Zingiber pattern linked above, chosen for the lack of lace and the slightly more relaxed fit. I knitted about half of it in late 2021 and then didn't do much knitting for about six months.
6. So last week I finished the body and sleeves, though not without mishap, and moved on to the hood, only to discover that I previously hadn't noticed that the main front cables and the side back cables don't continue onto the hood - if you put the hood up, from the back you see one cable motif go all the way from the hem up the hood, but the smaller side cables just stop around the neck, vaguely, in the middle of nowhere, in fact in the middle of a twist, and the same is true on the front.
  
  This was unacceptable to me, so I had to alter the hood. I continued knitting straight up from the neck for a more traditional hood with a center top seam (unlike the short-row heel turn in the pattern), but didn't put in enough increases. So I made a second attempt, continuing all of the cables from front and back straight up but adding a bunch of increases outside the center back cable as I went. When I finished this hood - tapering the side back cables into the center cable and finishing the back motif at the crown of the head before a center top seam - the cables looked a lot better and I figured I could probably block it to size, so I knitted on the icord edging that goes from the bottom front, up around the hood opening and down the other side for a clean edge. That was when I ran out of yarn completely right before the end of the second patch pocket. I unraveled the pockets and replaced them with miniature pockets, so they are at least the same size. I used every SCRAP of yarn, so when I blocked it and discovered that the hood is still... shall we say comically? shallow ... I had no way to fix it. I can try blocking it again in different directions, but I will probably just have to leave it hanging down my back, unwearable. Also I realized it wouldn't look good with a zipper, so I ordered some toggles.

A Tale of Cashmere and Woe: peacock blue Tsubaki by Hiroko Fukatsu

Wax is currently knitting the second incarnation of this sweater, last posted about in my post A Sad Story of Cashmere on November 1. But in chronological order,
1. Two cones of the peacock-blue cashmere-merino blend ordered for my birthday present in 2014
2. In 2016 I started designing the sweater to knit myself because waxjism hadn't gotten around to it yet. I had trouble with the gauge, with the construction, with the raglan decrease ratio, and eventually knitted the armpits-up portion about three or four times before settling on the final form of a peasant sleeve; I finished the sweater, eventually blocked it even though that required rinsing it about four times because the yarn comes still oiled from the spinnery and you need to strip that gently by washing with vinegar, but the vinegar is stinky, so you have to keep rinsing with just water, and then with gentle scented conditioner, and then with water again... anyway! The sweater was finished in 2016...
3. But rarely worn because it was slightly too snug, slightly shorter than I liked, slightly too tight around the armholes, and had lace portions that made it work with only some undershirts. So I had waxjism frog it for me in 2019 and started knitting Tsubaki by Hiroko Fukatsu. I'd been coveting this pattern since her first public images of her test garment circulated on Rav, before she released the pattern. Buuuut then when Wax eventually took it over from me after I lost my place in the pattern, we ran out of yarn and it was stuck at croptop length. It's in a ziploc in our cabinet because we can't bear to frog it.
4. I ordered a large quantity of Sandnes Garn Merinoull in KlømpeLømpe Jeans Blue, selecting this yarn specifically for having the same gauge as the ColorMart cashmere blend it's replacing. The color is fairly close. Hilariously, even though gauge is the same on the same needles, the fabric couldn't be more different, because the strands of merino themselves are very finely spun and tightly twisted; merino yarn of this type is elastic and bouncy, producing a squishy fabric that's extremely cosy (also visible in the last merino sweater waxjism finished for me, the adorable cowl-necked coral red Pom2 by Bonnie Sennott). She has now reached pretty much the same part of the sweater as the crop-top part she was forced to stop at before.