The sweater story

Christmas preparations (knitting and other) prevented me from blogging as promised but I've finally found some time so here it goes. The last time I really talked about my Christmas sweater progress I was working on the shoulder area and I had a ball and a half left. It turned out that this was not enough yarn to finish the shoulder area even after I ripped out my gauge swatch and knit it into the sweater.

I still had a couple of balls of the brown yarn left so I decided to use some of the orange yarn from the body and make up the length by making the brown stripe wider. To do this I could have ripped all the way back and reknit the body with more brown and less orange. I probably had enough time to do this but I would have had to guess just how much yarn to leave for the shoulders and I would have had to reknit the whole top intarsia section. Instead I decided to cut the sweater in half.
I put the bottom section of the sweater on spare needles and I spliced the end of yarn from the bottom of the top section to my working yarn at the shoulders. I then knit the shoulders out of yarn that was unraveling from the middle of the sweater.

Once the top of the sweater was completed I put the loose stitches on another needle and then I used kitchener stitch to reattach the top and bottom of the sweater.

I'm not sure that it is clear from the picture, but the body was now a good 3 inches shorter than it needed to be. I had planned for this (though I was surprised that it at up quite so much length). My next move was to cut the brown section in half and knit another 3 inches into it. Of course this had to be done once for the front and once for the back because the brown section was knit back and forth to allow for the intarsia. Having knit the extra 3 inches I once again kitchener stitched the sweater back together.

Finally I sewed up my side and underarm seams and tucked in a whole lot of ends. Here is the result modeled by its recipient:
It fits and he's happy with it. Hurray.

I think that this sweater may deserve an award for most seams in a 'seamless' sweater design.