Jane of All Trades

So the past two weeks afforded me two great chunks of knitting time: the kids’ swimming lessons, and the Olympics.  During that time, I knit the sleeves of the Phyllo Yoked Pullover:

then started the body and knit upward from the hem to the underarm:

(Contrary to what it looks like in the crappy, poorly-lit pictures I took, both the body and the arms are made from the same color yarn–though neither color here is quite it.)

If you’re looking at this bodice and thinking, “What?  It’s a crop sweater?” or maybe, “She must have a really short torso,” well, you’re almost right.  See, I was knitting this tube on a shorter cable circular–maybe 26 inches.  And so it was all bunchy.  Around about the waist shaping (accomplished by dropping down a needle size, from a US 7 to a 6) I thought it was, perhaps, a bit too bunchy.

But I persevered, against all doubt, in the face of overwhelming odds, just like a slightly less-than-fit Olympian.

Then, when I was all done, I knit it off (gather after bunch after fold) onto a 41″ cable–you know, just to see what it looked like.

It looked like the bodice of a Sweater Knit for Two.

So it’s not that it’s too short, in the picture above, it’s that it has a bad aspect ratio.  It’s too WIDE.  Way too wide.  wide enough that I had to take out FOUR of those pattern repeats.  And size down my needles.

The irony here, of course, is that not only did I swatch and then do the requisite math (I’m using a heavier yarn and had no expectation of actually hitting the guage specified in the pattern), but then I deliberately *knit the sleeves first* so that they would be like a really big swatch, and I could verify that everything was working out as planned.

What went wrong?  Aurgh.  Insert wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Perhaps my math was off, though I double checked it.  Perhaps my guage shifted wildly, though I was sober while knitting and it doesn’t look much different than the sleeves.

Perhaps…  Perhaps it’s a trick of the cotton silk yarn!  That’s it!  It stretched.  Yes.  Laterally.  It stretched laterally under its own weight while I knit!

That’s the ticket…

So I frogged it.  And re-checked my gauge, and re-calculated the math.  And I’m re-kitting it, still in the hopes that I will have it ready to wear when I go to Vermont in a couple of weeks.

It’s looking kind of small.