Last night I sat down to start putting my sweater pieces together.

The original pattern has the body (a tube with waist shaping) knit in the round to where the batwing sleeves start, then you work flat, increasing on both sides every row.  Finally the left and right shoulders are worked separately, with stair-step bind-offs worked from the sleeve’s cuff edge to the neckline.

First of all, I didn’t want a seam at the neck-to-cuff line above or below the arm.  Therefore when I was doing the knitting, instead of binding off 9 sts at the beginning of each rs (or ws) row, I worked the row in short rows, finishing with one row back across, picking up the wrapped stitches.  That left me live sts all the way from the neck to the cuff edge of each arm.

Usually when I’m doing a sweater, I’ll work a 3-needle Bind-Off on those live sts because I like the stability it gives the structure of the sweater.   In this case I really didn’t want a thick ridge down the whole length of the sleeve, so I grafted it closed.

Here you can see the sleeve graft in progress.  Instead of fighting to keep an even tension as I went, I used a long strand of yarn and worked the Kitchener stitch loosely on a few inches’ worth of stitches, then used my darning needle tip to catch the new stitches and snug them up to match the surrounding tension.  Then I’d work another few inches, and snug it up…etc.

The next step in the pattern would be to seam the underneath of the sleeves.  But in my case, because my sides were open, I wanted to close those first so I’d have a clear end point when seaming the sleeves.

It took me 2 tries until I got the stripes lining up perfectly, but now they’re right on track.  Lookit that seam!  (Your answer should be, “what seam”?)  😛

I stopped mid-mattress stitch to go to bed, so tonight I hope to get more done, if my school work allows.  I’ll try to seam both sides, then graft the underside of the sleeves, even those they aren’t live.  The backwards-loop cast-on used to increase at the underarm should be flexible enough to disappear into the grafting without too much bulk underneath.

Here’s a view of one completely grafted shoulder.  That’s the top (with the lower neckline) at the top, and the back at the bottom.  This would be the left sleeve, and the wide white area has my grafted seam down the middle; so that white part would sit atop my shoulders and run down to the end of the sleeve.

The sleeves aren’t supposed to have cuffs but I’m 99% sure I will be adding 1×1 ribbing in white, just like the neckband and lower band.  I’m going to try it on first, though, the only thing that would stop me would be if the sleeves were already too long.

And then my sweater will be complete!

And that’s a good thing!

I almost had a minor meltdown, knitting-related, the other night.

I cast on for my adjusted-to-work-flat version of Flugel, written out by rows with the color scheme I’d planned (6 rows white, 1 navy, 1 ribbon).   I didn’t do any fancy calculations (ie: basic math) to see if I’d have enough yarn to work the sweater, because in my head ribbon yarn alone did not equal enough yarn, but ribbon yarn used sparingly with lots of white yarn and some navy of which I have a bagful must equal enough yarn.  I didn’t even look at how much yarn the pattern required because, after all, I had a bagful.

(Let’s ignore that there was never enough white yarn for a whole sweater which is why I’d bought the navy with it, and that my new plan only used the navy for 1 row out of every 7).

So the other night I finished the ribbing, and did the first 6 rows of the sweater, and cut my yarn.  Whee!  I worked a row of navy, and cut the yarn.  Whee!  I worked a row of ribbon, and cut the yarn.  Whee!  I knit a row of white, turned, purled back…and ran out of yarn about 15 sts before the end of the row.

That was my first ball of white.  Hmm.

I checked the yardage for the 1X size of the sweater (I’m knitting the L but with the length of the 1X) and it’s roughly 1080.  I added up the yardage of the 14 balls of white that I have, and it’s 868.  Hmm.

I didn’t bother doing the precise math to see if removing the stitch count for the 2 rows of 8 that are in other yarns, and just let myself assume I don’t have enough.

Sadface.

But yesterday I came up with a plan.

Ok, I won’t have my mostly-white, kinda Parisian sweater, but I will have a sweater.

I stash-dove and found that I have another ribbon, a gold and white mix, that sorta matched.  I also had 100% cotton (dishcloth yarn) in the same gauge.  So I swatched.

First I tried using the dishcloth cotton for the middle 2 rows of every 6.

I know you can’t see a difference, but in person the white 100% cotton looks slightly yellower than the 50% cotton/50% acrylic Summer yarn.  It also looks duller and has more of a halo.  It’s passable, but I think I like the other version better.

dfdf

This is, from the bottom, an alternating 10 row repeat.  6 rows white, 1 navy, 1 blue ribbon, 2 white, then 6 navy, 1 white, 1 white/gold ribbon, 2 navy.

I like this, but think I want to break it up even more.  I just finished retyping out the pattern to be a) flat and b) with my colors written out row-by-row so I don’t have to think while knitting.  I’ve decided to go with the following repeat of colors:

That’s a 13 row repeat of 4 rows white, 1 gold ribbon, 4 white, 1 navy, 1 blue ribbon, 2 white, then the dark version 4 rows navy, 1 gold ribbon, 4 navy, 1 white, 1 gold ribbon, 2 navy, then repeat from the beginning.