Sweet Sweater Triumph!

Who's got a sassy pose and an awesome sweater? This girl!

You know what that is up there? That, my friends, is a tangled yoke! You can't tell from this picture, so I'll have to take a few more - but the vintage buttons on that sweater are big flat pearly dreams with little squiggles on them much like the sideways cable on the yoke of the sweater. This sweater was a triumph for a couple of reasons - 1, because my Feff and I decided we were too smart for the pattern, we ended up doing something funky that caused me to have to rip back after I had one button band down. Then I ripped and re-did. I put on both button bands (the Feff might have picked up the button bands for me because I am LAZY), sewed the ribbon backing, and put on the buttons. I tried it on and............disaster.

Disaster!!

You know what happened? The collar was too loose! Aauuuugh! That collar puckering was what I had to rip out in the first place. It was like a 3 little bears moment: This collar is too tight, this collar is too loose! Oh what could I do? My sweater was ruined RUINED! And I had already spent so much time on the button bands and the buttons. Crap.

But wait! I have been knitting since I was 7 - I understand how knitting works, more or less. I could tell from the fit of the sweater that all it needed was fewer stitches on the collar and smaller needles. But how could I fix the collar with the botton bands intact? With scissors, that's how. So, there are a couple of ways to fix something like this that I can think of that don't include undoing the button bands. The one I choose was to open the collar and unravel it down, leaving the button bands intact, but now longer than the sweater fronts. I then picked up the stitches. But the needle was too big. So....I ran out to my car and pulled the needles out of super secret project x. I ran back in and put all the stitches on that nice little size 1 hiya hiya. (I love hiya hiyas). Then, I went to start knitting and ......promptly snapped my needle. WHAT?

So.....I grabbed the pair of sock that I was working on for myself and knitted them onto the broken needle, thus freeing up their needle. Then I used that needle to do the garter rib for the collar, taking in stitches every 15 stitches accross. Then I turned and did the same. On rows 3 and 4 I switched to taking in stithces every 10. Simultaneously, I also made sure to knit  the button bands into the ends of my rows - thereby securing them back to the collar of the sweater. The bind off row, I also knitted some of the stitches together, to make sure the collar continued to cinch in.

The result? Can you tell by my smile below that I like my new sweater?

All of the surgery was worth it. I am going to wear the ever-living-heck out of this sweater. (and it is totally going to Stitches if it's not a million degrees)

Thanks to Agent J for the Awesome photo work!