Sleeved

March 6, 2010 - FLS, originally uploaded by Jesmy.

I finally finished my first sleeve last night. Whew. I'm going to tackle the second one today and hope that I can get a big chunk of it done tonight. I'd really like to be able to bind off this thing at knitting tomorrow night. :)

Oops...

I got mad at my FLS for a while. I attempted the first sleeve about 6 times and now matter what I did, I could NOT get the lace to even closely resemble the lace on the body. I blame this on a major change in tension in switching from flat to in-the-round, something I was not aware of until I tried this. Ugh.

I tried getting some photos to demonstrate the sheer ugliness that was the sleeves, but dark yarn and my increasingly evil camera could not agree and make a photo for me.

My YOs on the entire body of sweater had been freakishly tiny. Still confused about that one, but since it was done and I'm not doing it again, screw it. I think I purled them through the wrong side. That's my guess.

So I tried and tried and tried to get the sleeves to match and there was no success. I went down a needle size (in-the-round), switched to flat knitting, changed needle sizes a few times too, and nothing worked. In a fit of rage, I threw the sweater and it's mess of a ball of yarn across the room and yelled something vaguely like words.

Finally, at knitting this past Tuesday, I said screw it and decided I was going to have garter stitch sleeves. Which would have been WAY easier had the stupid pattern not called for 4 random rows of lace before splitting for the sleeves. I had issues with this random lace repeat as I was doing it. It just seemed... wrong somehow. Maybe I was having a psychic moment.

After a lot of hassle and picking up stitches (the first row was a real bitch), I got it all sorted out and now I have about 3/4 of a 3/4 length sleeve on one side. I'm hoping to get a lot of work done on it today. I didn't touch it after Tuesday until very late Friday because I had a lot of studying this week. Yay, midterms!

That could have been worse.

I finished the body of my FLS last night around midnight. It's happily folded up in my chair until I can get the time to start on the first sleeve. My goal is to have those finished within a week, but we'll see.

I have no time to knit tonight because I have to take a midterm... In fact, I should be doing that right now, but I'm considering this a warm up activity to get my brain working a little bit and get some concentration for more than 5 seconds at a time. I've been sleeping so poorly the last week and a half, so my body is all out of whack.

I stopped by Joann's on my way home and picked out some buttons. I didn't have the sweater with me, but I knew how many button holes I had since I'd counted them last night. I found some really pretty silver and black buttons that bring out the darker tones in the yarn. No pictures right now, I'll get some tomorrow when I can go outside and get decent, normal looking pictures in daylight. Also, that time thingie... Must get to my midterm now, wish me luck.

I've hit the wall of lace.

I'm getting really bored knitting my FLS. It's just been inch after inch of lace and it's not very exciting or fast. The purl rows are even more slow because of the YOs from the knit side. I'm just ready to get the body done and move along to the arms and finish this thing!

I'm really worried about the fit across the chest. I've read a lot of comments about having issues with that, so we'll see. I've been trying it on as I go, but it's difficult to tell before it's blocked out. I don't want to finish the whole thing just to have a sweater that won't button closed. I might put a lifeline in it today and try it on again to see if I can get a better idea.

ETA: Okay, I stuck it on some waste yarn tonight because I'm the kind of knitter who will just stop knitting if I think something is weird or wrong or won't fit. It fits, but just barely... Here's to really hoping that blocking opens it up a lot.

FLS

I was supposed to start this sweater last year around this time... but never got around to doing anything except salvaging the yarn. It's from a very large Men's J.Crew jumper that was very square and boxy, but such a lovely color. Purple, plus, grey, white, black all heathered together. So nice!



I made a failed attempt to start in October, but I had an old copy of the pattern and could never really get the yoke started because the pattern made NO sense. I put it on my project cards for the year, not really expecting to start it any time soon... But on February 1st, startitis struck and I wanted to knit something, but couldn't decide. I shuffled my cards and got the FLS. I wasn't super thrilled considering I had had so man difficulties getting started the first time, but I sat down and started again... And no luck...

Finally, I figured out I had an old copy. I downloaded the new one, loaded it on my kindle and also printed it out and I was ready!

I got through the yoke fairly easily until the YO round. I didn't get them spaced in a way I really liked the first time, so I pulled out the row and re-did the numbers so I could spread them out in a better way. (All the details are on my project page on Ravelry)

The next hard part was getting the lace to fit well. I had done the sleeves in a normal raglan fashion, measuring as I went to make sure they would fit around my arm, but when I got to the right size for my arm, I didn't have the right number of stitches to spread the lace evenly over 7 stitches minus the 16 for the edge. I couldn't really figure out how to fix this. I eventually just pulled back the first repeat of lace that I had done and a few rows of the garter stitch, and magically had a number that worked! I ended up with 270 sts. I have 56 sts across my sleeve, 72 across the back, and 43 on each front. (43-8 for the button band is 35). It worked out perfectly and made my life so much easier.



I'm just going through all the lace repeats now. I'm in the middle of my 6th repeat. I'll be adding buttonholes all the way down too. I just don't want a boob tent sweater, which is what this one will do with the buttons as they are now.

FLS Yarn Choice

I'm joining in with a KAL for the February Lady Sweater.

I'm not sure when I'll actually start the sweater, but I've picked my yarn out.



This is the closest to the actual color of the yarn. It's very plum with dark grey and heathered grey going all through it. It's recycled from a J.Crew sweater I bought at a thrift store. It's 100% itchy stiff wool. :) Mixed with some Shiba Inu fur.