(posted by christa – we’ll figure out how to change that soon!)
See? I can smile even though I ripped back about three feet of two-inches-wide band last night! I’d gotten the hood on (scroll down), and started doing the front bands, and had them just about wide enough to start thinking about placing buttonholes.. when I put it on, and realized that I’d totally strayed from the pattern.
Remember the pretty miter corners? Those are supposed to continue at the end of the project (argh.). After I knit back and forth along the bottom edge til I thought I had achieved my finished length, then I was just knitting back and forth along the front band from bottom edge, up around the hood, to the other bottom edge, thinking about the applied I-cord I’d use to finish it all up. I totally forgot that I was supposed to extend the front band to turn the corner and make it all across the bottom edge, too. Argh..
Here’s a nice shot of the interesting seaming around the shoulders and sleeve seam… and a peek of the hood!
More hood action! Yes, I’d talked about making the hood pointy, and that’s where I started.. but after getting the top part shaped and ready to graft, I popped it on my head, and it felt.. wrong. Put it on my boyfriend’s head to look at it from a distance (he put up with it quite nicely, considering that any fibre from a live animal makes him break out in hives).. and it was still wrong. To be specific, it left a lumpy little bumpy part at the back top of the head that just really wasn’t good.
The shaping of the collar and the hood is for a fairly close fitting, hopefully-will-stay-up-on-its-own-power hood… so my second (successful!) attempt, I stole the shaping idea of a hat for the back half of the hood.. so imagine chopping a hat in half, and then extending the chopped edge with a tunnel-like section.. and that’s the top of my hood! Unplanned, but neat, is the U-turn that the ridges take… and I learned a nifty thing about grafting in garter stripes: knit half a row in your new colour, turn, and then graft back by going into the bottom row knitwise and go into the just-knit stitches purlwise to make a beautiful garter ridge. Sneaky, and perfect! Totally my type of finishing!
In this picture you can see a bit of the U-Turn.. the grafted seam is just inside that bright purple U, much more noticeable up close, so you can come into the shop and inspect the finished jacket (maybe next week?) and tell me what a lovely job I’ve done! {grin}
One more view of the hood… right now it just comes to the edge of my face, so once the two-inch band is reknit, it should be just about right. Interesting how different the colours look when we’re inside the shop, hm?
In the interest of avoiding having to purl, I’m trying a move used to create entrelac-style joins that was covered in a Knitters magazine a few years ago.. so far, so good.. you’ll be able to see that one in action in the front miter corners of the band, when it is all done. I’d picked up buttons for my favourite side last week, but I went back to Button Button when I realized that it would be perfectly reversible if I chose decorative buttons for both sides, not just a plain backing button. The lovely staff there do an amazing job of helping with button choices.. even though I normally prefer to poke around on my own, this time I was very grateful for Marion’s assistance and am happy with the mottled green buttons she found for me! More pics next post, hopefully of a finished object!
