30-04-2024

The good news is that the larger size and/or the extra width I added at the back of the neck make for a much better fit; the garment now covers the front instead of being a strip dragged tight around the armpits by a too-small back panel, and the neck now folds over to form a fairly narrow high shawl collar, instead of turning back across almost its entire width. (I can imagine this might get itchy, though.)

I still don’t think this basic design/shape looks good on my square shoulders - it tends to bunch up in a horizontal wrinkle across the back - but with a bit of luck it will work better on Meda’s more feminine figure.

I was trying to avoid stripes as they looked so bad on the previous version, but I ran out of both the apricot and then the rose wool, so had to do another narrow stripe in the lemon wool at the end. This size certainly used up far more of the wool than the smaller one, but that was, after all, one of the main points of the project! In fact the narrow border strip doesn’t look at all bad, especially with the collar not folding back nearly so wide. One disadvantage of stripes is that it does produce an awful lot of extra ends to sew in afterwards….

There are a row of visible holes at the top back where I skimped on the original set of increases - the second set are reasonably invisible - but that has the advantage of making it more obvious which way up the garment goes, as does the seam down the centre bottom (which, too late, I realise that I have sewn in such a way that the neighbouring rib column is only one stitch wide instead of two!)

29-04-2024

Working my way up the L-XL size and currently on my third ball of oatmeal for the outer rib.
As an experiment I have tried increasing by another stitch after a further 5cm in the five columns between the existing six pattern increases, creating a section of 3x3 rib, in an attempt to make the back of the neck sit better.

I found I had to add another needle in order to make room for all the extra stitches, so I am now knitting the larger size on FIVE straight 7mm needles…!

25-04-2024

Cast off and tried it on without sewing up. The back clearly needs to be wider - the 33” size is barely more than a strip around my armpits and certainly doesn’t sit the way pictured on the (presumably small) model. There is no way this is going to fit a ‘medium’ bust; it doesn’t fit me.

As I still have two spare balls of apricot I’m afraid I think I need to undo the whole thing and make it in the next size up…. although that won’t solve the problem of the back-neck portion, which definitely doesn’t crinkle up softly as illustrated! The only one of the finished projects on Ravelry that shows it actually being worn has the wearer folding the whole width down across the shoulders, which looks pretty awful with the stripy design I’ve used. :-(

24-04-2024

All the lemon and rose wool now used up (3 complete balls in total). I have started on the apricot and may or may not add a strip of grey to finish the outer edge.

21-04-2024

The back piece was about two rows short of fitting into a single ball of wool…

I don’t have a 7mm circular needle, but I do for some reason have a lot of 7mm straight needles, so I am working the edge piece in the flat on two pairs of 7mm needles, in the style of an oldfashioned knitted-on collar.

I started picking up with the new wool halfway along the cast-on edge, picked up 18 stitches, cast on 20, knitted the 36 live stitches off the old needle, cast on another 20 stitches and then picked up the remaining 18 until I returned to the centre-back, where I will eventually sew the edges of this ribbing strip together. Since I am working in the flat I then turned and worked a knit row back, instead of a purl row continuing around the edge as instructed in the pattern. Knit 3, increase 1, adjusted to achieve the 148 stitches required to start the ribbing section.