Tuesday, March 18, 2008

To Frog or To Fix?

Time for a bit of reader feedback. (Come on lurkers, time to contribute!) :)

I made a shrug on a yellow KK long loom in mock rib stitch (my pics below). I love the way the fabric itself turned out, but the design does not fit the way I wanted. Essentially, I was trying to imitate a design I'd seen on Ravelry - something similar to this crochet shrug at left from http://www.crochet.org/. I wanted something that would go across both my shoulders and my collarbone with nice long sleeves for my super long arms. And I wanted to knit it. There was no shoulder shaping involved, essentially it is just a long panel split down the middle for the neck opening and seamed up the undersides of the sleeves. My original plan had been to do short row shaping and to make the front and back wider than just half the sleeve, but I got lazy about the increases and was fooled by the project while it was on the loom.

What's wrong with it? Some things I can fix and some I can't.
1. The neck opening is wider than I intended, but I've already crocheted it shut a little to reinforce it - I could do more.
2. The arms are too narrow to seam up any higher than just above my elbows, meaning that this won't work for its primary purpose (my office is berry, berry cold in the summer, and I had hoped to have something to slip on over sleeveless tops, but this would leave an unattractive swath of ... my husband gets mad if I call it turkey arms, so I'll just leave it at that.
3. The lack of shaping and the long sleeves mean I can't just seam up the neck opening and wear it across my back - it falls down.

So, in the "Frog it" category is the argument that now that I've seen it finished, I know where I could put short rows for the shoulder shaping and how wide the neck should be and how I would like to make one change to the stitching... Plus, I have nearly a skein of yarn left over to add to the height of the front and back.

In the "Fix it" category, I could crochet gussets into the arms to lengthen the sleeves and even add height using crochet with no frogging required. (That won't get rid of the lack of shaping in the shoulders and puckering that results though.) Also, I need to get to work on a time sensitive project for my husband, and I'm not sure I'll have time to do both before he needs his done, and by then, I'll be home for the summer and packing to move to colder climes where a completely redone shrug will be more appropriate.

I'm still debating, and I promised my husband (who needs a cute knitblog nickname) that I wouldn't rush into frogging it. It was time consuming to make 450 rows of 30+ stitches...
What think ye?

Yikes! Must get back to work!

1 comment:

Lacey said...

Hey there! Was reading Cass's blog and stumbled across the link to yours so I thought I'd come have a peek. As to suggestions, I'm fresh out. I knitted a beautiful poncho, didn't like the way it fit. So, I yanked all the seams out and made a shrug type thing out of it. Don't really like it either, but I have discovered that if you roll it up it makes a great pillow to lay on the couch with! I know that didn't help much, but I wanted to let you know that I feel your pain!!