Months in the Making

It's done it's done it's done! (Ahem. I may be just a little excited to be finished with this one.)

Pattern: Window to My Soul by Joji Locatelli
Yarn: madelinetosh tosh merino light (100% superwash merino) in Baroque Violet, less than three skeins
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) and US 3 (3.25 mm)
Started/Completed: September 2, 2013/May 24, 2014
Mods: fudged the numbers for the button bands/neckband a bit

This is one of those projects that I started and was all excited about. I actually got a good portion of the yoke done before the weather started to turn colder and I realized that it would be months before I could actually wear the sweater even if I did finish it then. At that point, it went into hibernation for many months. It took the Mad May WIP stitchalong to get me to get it out and finish it.

The smocked stitch pattern in the yoke is my favorite part of this sweater. It was very slow going, especially the smocked rows, and I nearly went blind reading the charts, but look how pretty it is! I did alternate my skeins every two rows on this sweater (every two rounds on the sleeves) to avoid pooling, though my skeins did seem pretty well matched. That slowed me down a bit as well, as I was stopping frequently to untangle skeins. It's a necessary evil -- I like the results, but I don't have to like the process.

If you look closely at the top photo in this post, you can see my one little oops. I had some difficulty picking up stitches for the button bands. I picked up for the first one and completed it, then tried to match the number I picked up for the second band (the one with the buttonholes). It took me three tries to get it right. The bit of fudging I had to do on the second band meant that while the total number of stitches was the same, the relative density of them in any particular area was not quite identical, so the ribbing doesn't completely match up. That's not immediately obvious until you look at where the yoke patterning ends between the bottom two buttons. If you look closely at the top photo, you'll see that the pattern doesn't line up on both fronts. Whoops. At some point I may take off the buttons and redo them, but I'm not sure this yarn would stand up to that very well, so I'm going to try to live with it at this point (and perhaps try some creative blocking to make one side of the yoke a bit longer to compensate).

Overall, in spite of that little error, I'm very pleased with this sweater. It's light and very wearable -- perfect to throw over a t-shirt or tank in my office, where the air conditioning always seems to be on full blast.