I had been wanting to tackle garment knitting for some time, but was too intimidated by them to try. I attempted to knit a raglan dog sweater, but found beating my head mercilessly against a wall would have been more fun than seeming up the sleeves and getting them to line up. I sort of put the idea of sweater making in the back of my head and focused on learning new stitches instead. But the idea of making something wearable, and not to mention beautiful, nagged at me.
When I discovered my favorite LYS (local yarn shop), Loop, in Philadelphia, I promptly enrolled in their top-down baby raglan class. Wow, an opportunity to crawl out of my secluded yarn stash and go out into the world to meet other obsessively nutty knitters AND be taught how to knit a baby sweater WITH NO SEAMS was too good to pass up!
The class was great. I started the collar, joined in the round and after a while started to see the formation of the sleeves and body magically appear beneath my fingers. How exciting! Gauge wasn't terribly important in the baby sweater world since babies grow so fast, the idea is that some baby will fit into it at some point. So even though I had done a gauge swatch to make sure I was right on, gauge wasn't really a focus here.
I left the first class with instructions to knit until it's time to break for the sleeves and then come in to the next class ready to learn how to do this. I was so excited about my baby sweater that I was to the sleeves the very next day. What to do? The next class was in 2 weeks and there was certainly no way I could idly wait around not knitting this adorable baby sweater for 2 more weeks! The light bulb went on and off I went to pick up a second pair of circular needles for which I cast on a second baby sweater. Surely this would keep me busy until the next class where I'd walk in with 2 baby sweaters ready to break for the sleeves. Yes, this was a perfect idea. But only a few days later, I was back to where I had started. At this point, I could wait no longer and so I dove head first into the pattern and moved on. I could not stop myself, on and on I went until I had one sweater completely done! I was SO excited! My first baby sweater! It's beautiful!
But now what? Class is still a week away and I have to at least show up ready to go forward with everyone else?
I cast on a third sweater.
Yes. A third.
By the time my second class rolled around, I had one complete sweater and two bodies complete. I was high in production mode and proud of it!
I CAN KNIT A SWEATER! YES I CAN!
By the third and final class, 2 sweaters were complete, one was still in body form, a matching hat had completed one ensemble and a fourth sweater had been started. The last sweater is what threw me over the edge. I thought myself clever when I decided to adapt the pattern to handle a thinner cotton yarn instead of the heavier worsted wool I had used in the last 3 sweaters. I wasn't afraid of a little math, and so I calculated and cast on. How clever am I?
When my fourth sweater (err, t-shirt) was complete, I was so proud of myself (and so full of myself), that I was ready to tackle anything! I had eagerly purchased a bit more of this wonderful superwash wool that I had knit one of the baby sweaters out of and decided to try my hand at a tank for myself.
This tank was from the bottom up. I had it all planned out. I had measured myself, drew the tank and calculated my stitches based on my gauge from the baby sweater and eagerly cast on. Every decrease row made me smile as I quietly patted myself on the back for figuring out how many stitches to decrease over x rows to shape the waist. I was knitting feverishly as I anxiously awaited this beautiful tank to materialize under my hands. I was knitting faster than I'd knitted before and when I finished the last decrease a warm and fuzzy feeling came over me when I measured my length and found I'd accomplished all my decreases in exactly 10 inches, just as planned.
At this point, I was eager to see how it would lay on me as I got closer to knitting my bust, so I slipped all my stitches onto waste yarn so I could try it on.
*GASP!*
This thing was huge! I was swimming in it. This can't possibly be... I did everything right! I laid the half knit tank out on the ground and measured it.
IT'S TOO WIDE!
After my heart stopped pounding, I realized that in my haste to knit, my tension must have been off as I was knitting 3.5 stitches to the inch, not 4 as I had done on the baby sweater. A measly 1/2 a stitch difference in gauge has caused me to knit a LOT of extra inches. I was sick over it.
I took a quick photo of my blob of knitted fabric with my cell phone before dishearteningly ripping my work all the way back. It's not the best quality photo, but it's better that you don't clearly see my HUGE mistake. Yes, one side is as wide as the arm of a chair. Don't even go there... My head has been deflated. Perhaps that's a good thing.
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