Tastes Like Chicken

The sleeve is gone. Ripped back to the shoulder. I tried it on and decided the 8" armhole depth was a bit...confining. I had used the depth of an existing sweater to determine my armhole depth for the FLAK, but the sweater I measured was a raglan. I think the angled seam affects the fit at the shoulder. Plus, I re-read my copy of Knitting in the Old Way and saw that the percentages for the armhole depth are, in fact, smaller for a raglan than for a peasant sleeve.

I'm going to knit another inch or so down the front and back. Sigh.

When the frog eats that much yarn, I have to set aside the project for a day or two before I can face it again. Which is okay, because I had the perfect project to pick up for just that long. The Winterberry square in Janet Szabo's Taste of Aran afghan. The afghan is for my 11-year-old daughter, who wants the afghan in 3 colors: green, purple, and blue. I have five squares completed already.



Last night I was knitting along, not consulting the pattern because I'd knit enough of it to know what I was doing. Until I got to this point:

Notice anything--I don't know--WRONG with this? How about how the V on the right heads away from the bobble thingy two rows before the next V? And, as it turns out, all the other Vs across the whole square. Wouldn't be so bad if it were the first one that had been done incorrectly.


I just noticed one of the previous afghan squares has a mistake in a cable cross. I'm not fixing it. That frog has had enough to eat.

The back... and the front, too.

I knit the back. Honest. I even took pictures, but somehow I decided to delete them from my computer and camera before they made it to the blog. Janet's directions were very clear and I was able to pick up stitches and cast on across the neck without any problems. I used stitch markers for the first row or two of the pattern, but then they were in my way and I didn't need them to keep track of what I was doing. I use one marker on the wave cable to remind me when I last made a cable cross, but other than that, I can keep track visually of what's going on.

I managed to save my photos of the front, and even took pictures of my progress along the way.

Here's the front, just a few rows after I joined the two sides:



Again, I didn't have any problems or mistakes on the front. I'm sure that means I made an egregious error on the saddles or something. I have a feeling of dread that I must have made a terrible mistake somewhere, only I haven't discovered it yet.

Here's the sweater after I completed the front down to the armholes:


Erm, I think I should have cropped the above photo a bit to hide the fact that I'm working ahead in the book and have picked up stitches for the sleeve. I'm cheating again. Sue me.

Here's another shot of it, folded as it will (sort of) look, eventually:


I like the way the wave cables hit the neck edge, don't you? Keep your eyes on that part of the sweater so you can't see the sleeve on the left.

The saddles.
So I made a few mistakes on the swatch. That's okay. The swatch was for practice. I did my saddles with no mistakes. This pic is a bit washed out, due to the sun scampering behind a cloud two seconds after I took the swatch pictures, so my camera decided it needed the flash.