Beautiful Belle

I am in love with this sweater. Belle. (From Mission Falls Quinte Scrapbook) that I started last summer after the Great Blankie Fix Up of '06, to refresh your memory. Working with the blankie rekindled my love of Mission Falls Cotton, and I had some pink (Cosmos #203) in stash just waiting for it's time.

Here’s what I love about this sweater:

1. It’s totally wearable. It does not require that I go out and buy a camisole like all the sweaters in Interweave Knits, or a certain color skirt, or wear my hair a certain way. It will look good with pants, jeans, capris, skirts, black, khaki, denim, short sleeve tee, long sleeve tee, or blouse.

Basically, my entire wardrobe that I already have, this will look great with. As I am knitting this, I can tell: This will be my GO-TO sweater.

2. It’s very pretty. Pretty color, pretty cables, a little lace. Love that.

3. It’s fun to knit. It’s way more interesting than stockinette, and yet it’s a completely memorizable pattern that I can tell what to do just by looking at the row below, and I can do it around the kids. Heck, I can do it while watching 24.

4. It’s kind of show-offy, in a quiet way. I mean, it’s no fancy fair isle wing-ding. But it’s definitely something that I would be proud to wear in a room full of knitters. Like Stitches, or a knit-in for charity, or a famous bloggers book signing: a "knitting soiree" kind of thing. And if you are a knitter, and you attend these knitting soiree events now and then, then this is a nice thing to have in the closet.

So, keeping all these things in mind, that this could very well be my knitting-soiree-go-to sweater, I decided that this would be the time to conquer my fear of short-rowing shoulders.

The instructions for this sweater have you do the stair step bind off shaped shoulders, and then seam the shoulders together. I have done this with many sweaters, and on the last one (Olympic sweater '06) I just wasn't happy with the resulting seam. The cable pattern didn't quite match up and I really wanted to do better.

One morning, fresh with coffee and armed with a little hand drawn diagram, I had a mind meld with shortrowing, and claimed victory:

Above you see the shoulder seam with 3 needle bindoff, pattern matching up nicely, and the back neck drop I added. The pattern had you bind-off the back straight across the neck. I think that feels tight against the neck, and adding the drop makes for a better fit.

I was very happy with myself, and I blocked it out on the handy dandy striped beach towel.

Then I stepped back to take a picture.


What the BLEEP?! Can you see it?


How about now?

Friends, we have not had a knitting disaster of this magnitude since the Great Ene’s Scalene Triangle of 2006. There would be no fancy laddering down to fix this situation. I would have to rip out the shoulder seam and re-knit nearly the entire back to fix this. You know I am seriously anti-rip. So I waited for it to dry and took it to several different lighting environments to assess the situation.

Dining room table, bright sunlight through the windows:

Seems ok.

Outside in super-bright direct sunlight.

Definitely ok.

Living room under incandescent light:

Definitely not ok.

How can this be my go-to-knitting-soiree sweater with a big dyelot stripe issue across the back?!?

-TO BE CONTINUED-