Well. Here it is, the back of the sweater…
Remember how I said that I was going to take the sides of the sweater in, and do real tapering for the waist on the front of the sweater? Well, I had my brother come by for a fitting (I know, a luxury we don’t all have for christmas presents) and realized that the sweater was 36 STITCHES too big at the waist. 18! That would be a lot of bulk to have dangling off of the inside of your sweater. That would be a visible representation of my laziness that would be forever glaring me in the face - not laziness in making my own yarn, or knitting my own fabric, but laziness of pretending that after all that work, 36 stitches of fabric dongling around inside of a sweater is no big deal. Then deciding that no one would notice, even myself. Its not even a complicated pattern for crying in the mud.
So, last night, I frogged it. Justin’s opinion “You can’t hide that much fabric, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself!” pushed me over the edge. So, I frogged not just the back, but the little bit of front too, because I had already gone past the point of tapering. Frogging the whole thing took about 10 minutes. That is roughly 1/10th of the time it took to knit it. Remarkable.
I was laughing as I was frogging. I felt giddy because ripping out knitting is so upsetting when you grab a piece of yarn from your basket and pull so that you can use it to tie up your skein of handspun for washing, only to realize you had ripped back the cuff of your “finished” socks. And I was doing it on purpose! I couldn’t believe I was ripping out all of that work, only to start over and still not know if tapering would work. (I have this fear that though I’ve measured, and then analysed my measurements that I will sew the thing together and it will be too small. It used to happen when I was sewing, molecules would rearange themselves and my body would somehow be bigger than the perfect shirt I copied the pattern from. I felt like I never quite got a grip on the nature of measurement.) It also crossed my mind to do it in the round. Go all the way. However, upon further analysis of the situation, I thought that would be risky because my guage is definately different in the round. I will knit the next sweater in the round, with tapering if the tapering works with flat knitting. I will not try two new things at once.
Anyway. Here is what I decided.
Larry is 18 inches from the top of his pants pockets to his arpit area. Thus, his waist is approximately centred on his body, so if I decrease 1 stitch per inch for 9 inches, I will hit the waist with a gentle taper. I will then increase at a slightly faster rate until I get to his armpits - about one every 7/8 inch, This will allow for some extra chest room. Hopefully I don’t have to frog again, and hopefully blocking will get out any funny shaping.
Good thing I’m a process knitter.