I’ve finished the first three colorways, which means I did my crochet cast-on at the underarm and have finished the V-neck increases.

I knew I was playing a bit of yarn chicken with colorway 2, trying to get to the same row number on the back and both fronts. As it turns out, I lost by about 40 stitches! I had started with the back, so that if I ran short, I would have to frog only the first front I worked on, rather than the entire width of the back. And don’t tell anyone, but I left the back worked through row 86 while the two fronts are only worked through row 85. That’ll just be our little secret!!! You won’t tell on me, will you???

No Body Shaping

If you looked at the chart linked in the earlier post, you might have noticed that for this garment, unlike the first two sweater adventures, I’m not doing any body shaping. That’s because I want as much length as I can get, and since there won’t be any closures on the vest’s fronts, it doesn’t really matter if the bottom edge can get around my hips or not. I’m just going to let it hang open, or, at most, I’ll use a pin of some kind at the bottom of the V-neck.

One Little Hiccup

If you look very closely at the right front where colorways 1 and 2 meet, you might be able to tell there’s a little oddity in the Mistake-Stitch Rib. Somehow I didn’t work the pattern correctly, so there were purl bumps going across what should be the all-knit columns.

The easiest fix was to drop down, one at a time, those knit columns past the purl boo-boos, then hook them back up again. I did so, then carried on. (And this correction is actually what’s visible in the first picture above.)

I realized that the knit-stitch columns have a kind of zigzag look, perhaps because of the way the adjacent but staggered knits and purls pull on them. But at the junction between the dark and medium purple, that zigzagginess was interrupted because I had a couple of rows of plain 2×2 ribbing.

When I started colorway 4, I decided that my simple fix was simply not good enough. So I took a deep breath—and dropped down the central nine stitches of the right-front band. (Leaving the very edge stitch intact meant I had regular “rungs” rather than two-row loops to deal with.) I was then going to work each row back up one at a time, always using the lowest available rung.

While it seems like you should be able to use the project needle to rework such sections of dropped stitches, I find in practice that I can’t. If I try to, then it is nearly impossible to work the final stitch or two: I just run out of working yarn. Since I was using a 3.00 mm needle, I used a 2.50 mm needle to work the repair.

I had two false starts:

• The first time I didn’t work the stitch pattern correctly. 🙄
• The second time I had reworked about 10 rows into the medium purple when I realized I had only eight, rather than nine, stitches the needle. I thought I had dropped a stitch somewhere, so I frogged back to the dark purple looking for it. I still didn’t find it. So I dropped about six rows into the dark purple without finding it, which was well past where I had frogged to originally, so I… Well, the stitch pattern was looking right, so I decided to, uh, just not worry about it. If the stitch pattern is right, it’s right, right??

When I finally got through working the medium purple, I found the missing ninth stitch. Somehow I didn’t frog it past the border of the pink and medium purple, just through the pink. I added that ninth stitch onto my 2.50 mm needle and worked my way back up to the rest of the live stitches.

The tension in that part of the band is a little wonky, but the yarn redistributed itself pretty well just through continued handling. If the first laundering cycle doesn’t finish the redistribution, then I may do some adjustments by hand, tugging leg by leg across each affected row. I may, but honestly, I’ll probably not bother.

Yarn Usage

I’m pretty psyched by how much of colorways 2 and 3 I was able to use. For colorway 2, Ashland, I had just 1.05 g left, and for colorway 3, Turkish Delight, I had just 1.50 g left.

I expect to work about 38 total rows with colorway 4, as I’m using barely less than 3 g per row now that I’m at the full stitch count.

For the bottom edge, I’ll need to increase 2 sts to keep the stitch pattern intact, and I expect that since Mistake-Stitch Rib is a species of ribbing, which of course entails moving the yarn back and forth between front and back, each row will take a bit more yarn than I’m using on the stockinette. Once I’ve worked the first bottom-edge row in Mistake-Stitch Rib, I’ll weigh the yarn remaining, work a few more rows in pattern, then re-weigh the yarn. Once I know about how much yarn I’m using per row, I’ll—hopefully—be able to leave aside enough to bind off. I hate tinking bind-offs! 🙄 squared