Little Sailor Girl, Part 2

Oh, Little Sailor Girl…

I had knit a good portion of the bottom of the sweater (about 6 inches) when Tour de Fleece started.  So, the sweater was put aside while I worked on my spinning and then my Ravellenic Games knitting.

Labor Day weekend I pulled it out again.  I figured out how much the garter stitch striped edging would measure, and subtracted that from what the total length was supposed to be before beginning the armhole shaping.  Because I had cast on the sweater as one whole piece, I started with the right side for the next part of the pattern.

As you start the armhole shaping, you also start the collar shaping, which is a folded over portion of a sort of shawl collar that becomes the back flap (Is there a better name for that, does anyone know?).  Because the collar is folded over and shows stockinette stitch on the front, it gets purled on the right side of the piece.  Does the pattern mention this?  Not really.  Now I knew, because I could easily see that from the pattern photos, but did that stop me from somehow screwing up the increases in such a way that it looked like garter stitch? No.

I ripped it out and started the shaping section again, this time using a Pfb to increase.  I also switch the k2tog decreases to ssk along where the collar joins the body to get a left-leaning look.  I kept the k2tog for the armhole decreases since those should lean to the right.  Then, I find the first of several pattern mistakes.  At least I hope it was a mistake; I haven’t figure out why the pattern would suddenly have you K the collar stitches on the right side of the piece when you’ve been purling them up to that point.  The same mistake was in the instructions for the left front as well.  (At this point, yes, I went looking for errata and found none.)

The collar progressed nicely once I got to the part that just has you continue without anymore increases or decreases till it’s a certain length.  Then, the shoulder shaping was pretty straightforward.  The next step is some short row shaping on the collar, which was written out alright except for the part where it doesn’t tell you to pick up and knit the wraps when you go back over all the stitches.  This would explain why there are a few of these sweaters on Ravelry that looked like there was something odd going on with the collar at this point; wraps were probably left unknit.

At this point I put the stitches on waste yarn and went to the left front, which went smoother after figuring out the eccentricities of the right side instructions.

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