I finished my Stilwell on Wednesday and finally had a chance to take pictures! This past week I was on vacation for the first part of the week and at a conference for the second. The time off combined with all the knitting I did over New Year's weekend meant I finished a sweater in a record 15 days! Here she is:
needles: 6s for stockinette, 8s, for colorwork, and 5s for the placket
I made a lot of modifications to this pattern. As the pattern is written, the hip measurement is smaller than the bust measurement, and the body is pretty darn short. Maybe Jared has a couple of friends on the U.S. Olympic swimming and diving teams and designed it for them. Most women I know aren't built like that. To solve these issues, I cast on the numbers of stitches required for the XL size and then did most of the waist shaping decreases. I only did enough increases to bring the stitch count up needed for the L size. For the length problem, I didn't start the waist decreases until I finished the bottom colorwork band.
I decided to shorten up the sleeves by an inch and a half so it was more 3/4-length sleeves and less wrist-length sleeves. I adjusted the sleeve circumference by casting on two extra pattern repeats for a total of 45 stitches on each sleeve (knit two-at-a-time).
The only part of the sweater I wasn't happy with was the collar. I was originally planning on just doing a simple collar of a couple of garter rows but the neck opening was slightly boatnecky for my taste so I decided that the shawl collar would be best. I didn't want a collar that was as tall the one in the pattern. Instead of doing short rows as written, I did *k1, w&t* to space them out and shorten the height of the collar.
Overall, I'm very happy with this sweater. It's shaped nicely and fits well. You know why? Because I swatched! I actually had to do two swatches for this sweater: one for the plain stockinette section and one for the colorwork, both knit in the round. If I had used the needle size recommended by the pattern, it would have turned out way too big, which would have meant a lot of frogging to correct it. I spent a couple of hours swatching and it saved me a lot of heartache!
I have a pair of socks on the needles that I plan on finishing this week and a scarf for my local yarn store's
January/February knit-a-long. With any luck I'll have another Finished Object post by the end of the week!