It’s Furious Balancing

I finished the Back-to-School U-Neck Vest from Stefanie Japel’s Fitted Knits collection. I do think that she is my favorite knitwear designer.¹ I was able to wear the finished vest to the office in this lovely 60-degree spring weather. This is probably the last time I’ll be able to wear one of my handknits until October. I got a lot of compliments on my creation, even though I arsed-up the back neckline.

In any event, this FO is dedicated to Eowyn, Shieldmaiden of the Rohirrim. The styling reminds me a little of Eowyn’s dress in The Two Towers.² I’ve been watching The Lord of the Rings (yes, again), but with the cast commentary audio instead of the regular movie audio.³ I did a lot of knitting while sitting on the couch watching those extended edition DVD’s.

It took about 3 weeks from start to finish. I only did minor modifications from the published pattern. The most important one was narrowing the shoulder straps. Many people commented on Ravelry that they felt they were too wide, so I reduced them down to 12 stitches. There were 14 in the pattern, so that’s not much; I was uncertain about making them any narrower than that.

I Kitchener stitched the shoulder seams instead of doing a three-needle bind off. I’ve done the three-needle bind off before, on the Tempting sweater, so I thought I should try something different.

I reduced the number of rows on the picked-up stitches for the neck and armholes. The pattern called for 3 purl rows, 3 knit rows, then 3 purl rows again. Way too much for my tastes. I did three purl rows only on the armholes and three purl rows and one additional knit row on the neck (just to spruce up the neck a bit and make it slightly different than the arms). I think all those additional rows on the neck and arms called for in the pattern would give it too much of a “Judy Jetson” feel — definitely not my style.

The final modification was the increases used for the bust darts. The pattern called for lifted increases, which are different from make 1’s (even though I find a lot of people who think they’re the same stitch). I wasn’t comfortable with my messy, miserable-looking lifted increases and used mirrored make 1 increases instead. Look! a close-up of Laiane’s tits!

I used two and a half skeins of Cascade 220 in Walnut Heather (Color # 8013, approx. 550 yards) and my size 7 and size 5 Knit Picks interchangeable circular needles in Harmony Wood⁴

All in all, a good pattern, a somewhat flattering finished object, and something I can actually wear in public.

Forth Eorlingas.

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1. Boy, how geeky is that to have a favorite knitting pattern designer. Yeesh. I am obviously beyond hope. [↩]
2. I’ve found entire web pages dedicated to this dress. [↩]
3. I’ve also been watching the documentary-style stuff that came with the extended edition DVD’s. LOTR overload. I’m just happy I haven’t been talking like Gollum in public. My precious… [↩]
4. Those are very sexy needles, by the way. I wasn’t very impressed when I saw them in the printed catalog. Too garish. I managed to see some up close during my January pilgrimage to see Franklin at ThreadBear, and fell in love with them. So sturdy! So smooth! 100 times better than the Denise Interchangeables I have, in my exceedingly humble opinion. [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.