I must admit to being a bit worried over how the WIP’s edgings all wanted to turn under or flip up (depending on whether they were vertical or horizontal). But I wove in all the ends and ran the FO through a complete machine laundry cycle, hoping for the best.

And wow! What a change in the fabric! It’s really hard to see the difference in the before and after pics, but I can tell you that the hand softened up considerably—and perfectly, as far as I’m concerned. The edges now lie nicely flat and exhibit absolutely no tendency to curl under or flip up. Which is a good thing, as I am quite enamored with Mistake-Stitch Rib and will be using it in the final adventure.

The dimensions did change a bit after washing, and I will probably wash the vest again just to make sure the fabric has totally stabilized gauge-wise before I determine stitch and row counts for the final sweater in this series.

The main measurements, all in inches, changed before/after washing as follows:

• Back width at underarm: 19.5/20.5
• Hip: 42/43
• Back neck: 5.5/6.5
• Yoke depth: 11/10.25
• Back length: 23.375/21

Note that the fronts were designed to overlap a good bit, which is why the chest measurement is given as only the back width.

Yarn Usage

I was able to use nearly all of colorways 2 through 5. While there was a large amount of colorway 1 left over, that is not an issue, since I will add it to the yarn for sweater adventure #4 (Goddess was part of both Hawthorne value packs).

I was using my chart to count stitches, and I kept weighing at intervals the remaining yarn as I worked with each colorway to help me judge how many more rows I could get out of it. The system worked extremely well, and using a chart in this way is one I hadn’t thought of as I was writing the charting book. 🙄 I think that’s because I never tried to work with limited yarn, the way I was forcing myself to work with the four colorway sets in this series of sweater adventures. In the past, I’ve always overestimated the amount of yarn I’d need, so yarn chicken was never an issue.

Once I got past the underarms and was working the fronts and back in a single wide piece, I found I was using right at 3 g per row. I knew that the Mistake-Stitch Rib on the bottom edge would use a bit more than that, so I had to guess (and a guess it was) how much more each of those rows would take compared to the stockinette. Then I could backtrack to figure out how many stockinette rows I could work before starting the edging. I way overestimated (well, I hoped it was an overestimation!) each edging row at 4 g. If I wanted 15 to 20 rows in the bottom edging, that would take 60 to 80 g of the 112 g I was starting with. That meant I had 32 to 52 g to work the stockinette, at 3 g per row. I could therefore work 11 to 17 rows of stockinette before switching to the edging stitch pattern. I made a command decision to start the edging on row 181, which meant I worked 15 rows of stockinette in the final colorway.

Once I switched to Mistake-Stitch Rib, I weighed the remaining yarn after every wrong-side row. For the first 10 rows, I found I was quite consistent at 3.25 g per row. Since plain old ordinary binding off usually takes about half again as much yarn as a regular row, that meant I needed to allow 4.88 g for the BO, which I rounded up to a full 5 g. I absolutely DID NOT want to tink a partial BO and a full regular row in a stitch pattern!

When I had worked 18 rows of edging, I had 7.30 g of yarn left. Since that was less than 3.25 plus 5, I BO at that point. When I finished the BO, I had 2.62 g of yarn left, so it used 4.68 g, which is 1.44 times what it took to work a regular row. Worst-casing the estimating and rounding up worked well to keep me out of trouble. Phew!

• Colorway 1: 12.44 g of 113.83 g remained
• Colorway 2: 1.05 g of 112.36 g remained
• Colorway 3: 1.50 g of 112.73 g remained
• Colorway 4: 1.35 g of 115.20 g remained
• Colorway 5: 2.62 g of 112.53 g remained

The finished vest weighs 550 g (the above numbers give a total of 547.69 g, but my regular yarn scale only goes up to 500 g, so I had to weigh the final vest with my kitchen scale, which is only accurate to within 2 g).

The washed gauges turned out to be 24.5 sts and 38 rows per 4 in, compared to my swatch’s identical 24.5 sts but only 32 rows per 4 in. Knowing that the row gauge tightens up fairly considerably will affect the design of the last garment in this series.

The Final Adventure

As I was working this vest, I was already determining the basic characteristics for sweater adventure #4. Since I have two more colorways in the Fog Bank VP than I had in this Bramble VP, I’ll be able to make a sleeved sweater:

• top-down (to help avoid yarn chicken, even though my technique of counting stitches with a chart has proved to work very well)
• raglan (because it appears to use less yarn than a circular yoke, based on the yarn-usage results from sweater adventures #1 and #2)
• V-neck (because then I have no fears of not being able to get my extra-large noggin through the neck opening)
• hip length (because that length best suits my rectangular figure)
• sleeves as long as possible (based on how much fabric the yarn can make, especially considering the postwashing row gauge tightens up quite a bit)

I also want to work seamlessly in the round, because purling half of the vest just started to get on my nerves! (Strangely, working the Mistake-Stitch Rib was not annoying, even though I’m a “brute-force thrower.” Hmm.) Of course, the upper part of the yoke will have to be worked flat, until I get to the bottom of the V-neck and finally join to work ITR.

Since I never swatched the Hawthorne ITR, I’ll have to sacrifice at least two more of my 10-g Hawthorne co-op samples to see which size needle will give me the same stitch gauge as I get working flat on 3.00 mm needles. Based on my experience with CotLin, I’m hoping I’ll need to use 3.25 mm needles ITR.