Can you spot the problem with this picture?
Pretend this isn't the worst picture you've ever seen.
I know the sweater isn't done. While, sure, I could stand to lose a few pounds (working on it!), it is much. Too. Small. Thing is, when I swatched--twice, mind you--my gauge was off. Off enough (more than 2 sts per 4 inches) to make some accomodations. I figured (with an actual calculator--thanks, Cindy!) that if I just knit the next smaller size, I would end up around the size that I wanted--the 38" finished bust.
Turns out, my gauge was spot on. 18 sts per 4 inches. Exactly.
So now, the sweater that I thought would fit--because I knit the smaller size--is actually too small. Go figure.
How about another round of Whatever Can Go Wrong, Will?
Can you identify the major disaster in this photo?
In this pattern, you knit each of the pieces--the right front, the left front, the back and each of the sleeves--as you normally would, sew them together (again, as you normally would), and then knit the bands separately, stitching them down after they're knit, easing to fit. This is done because they're knit on two needle sizes smaller than the rest of the sweater. That part isn't hard. Actually, there isn't anything about this sweater that was hard. It was brilliantly written. Entirely error-free. I set each of the sleeves in perfectly the first time, which never happens to me. My seaming is rather spectacular, if I do say so myself.
(Insert dastardly music here.)
In the upper righthand corner of the photo is the center back of the neck, the place where you join the two front bands. In the lefthand side of the photo is where I've stopped knitting. And that mini ball of yarn there? That's all I have left.
Technically, I haven't run out. There's more on the shelf, in the very same dyelot. Heck, I own the place--I can break open a new ball whenever I want to, especially for a shop sample. I was just hoping that I could knit the entire sweater from eight balls of Kureyon. In light of everything that's happening all over the world right now, complaining about needing an additional twelve yards of yarn seems a tad shallow, if not completely irrelevant to Life, which I am not ashamed to admit.
The shameful part is the fact that I knew--I just knew--that this is the very sort of thing that happens when you announce to the Universe that you can knit a sweater in two weeks.