deco

Deco by Kate Davies, raveled here with Chickadee in peacock, by Quince & Co.  I finished this on a peak day of this heat wave, last Thursday, I believe it was 104F, with a heat index of 112.  Perfect timing as always.

Modifications:

• I added 2+ inches to the body before beginning the Deco pattern in the front
• I noticed that the waist shaping was a very sharp decrease, designed more for Marilyn Monroe hips than mine (although I wouldn't mind those hips), so once I realized this I only decreased 20 st rather than 24 and I think knit a few more rows before doing the last decrease.  Therefore, I did one less increase as well.
• I messed around with the number of stitches I picked up for the armhole, doing 1-2 less I think and I did not do the whole breaking the yarn and picking it up later, I just kept knitting around.
• As all the knitters can tell (and maybe some non-knitters), I ran out of yarn, hence the two-tone sleeve.  I realized pretty early on I wouldn't have enough yarn because of how much length I had to add, but the shop ran out of Peacock.  I ended up liking the two-tone look anyways, I wanted it to be reminiscent of elbow-length gloves.

This is a good pattern, of course, because Kate Davies is a great designer.  I liked the short-row sleeve caps and using fabric on the back of the button bands (I used bias strips from the same fabric as the shirt I'm wearing in the above picture), but I couldn't find snaps that weren't ugly unfortunately!  But I'm intrigued by combining knit and fabric and I want to do more of this...

Oh yeah, after knitting the first sleeve and halfway into the second, I realized I wouldn't have enough peacock to knit to the same point on the second sleeve before switching colors.  Be warned this next part is boring if you're not a knitting dork, so I advise you to skip accordingly. 

So I did some knitting surgery and some unorthodox techniques.  I removed the light blue section of the first sleeve by just pulling out the connecting stitches, keeping the light blue part in tact.  Then, on the second sleeve I knit as far as I could go, then began knitting directly from the first sleeve to the second sleeve.  See the crappy picture below?

I know, how can you possibly make sense of that picture?  Anyways, I knitted them roughly to the same point, then used kitchener stitch to stitch the rest of the first sleeve back together.  But I had to do this three times before I got the right number of stitches on the length of both sleeves.  Fascinating, yes?

THEN, I worried the sleeves wouldn't be long enough so added length to the cuffs.  Lo and behold after blocking, they are a little too long, but not bad.

Happy to finally be finished (I bought this yarn at the Metro Yarn Crawl back in April - thanks for helping me pick out the color Kim!)  I always think I'm going to knit sweaters faster than I actually do.  For this reason, I am knitting a pair of socks now.  Quicker gratification to then shove into a pair of shoes and never look at.  Makes no sense.