Monday Project Report – Boy am I grumpy

As my knitting friends know, I have been working on making the Polkadot Jacket for my niece Kathryn Rose.  The yarn for it was discontinued so I searched yarn store sale bins and bought some off of a very nice Ravelry friend who shipped the last few skeins I needed to me at a very reduced rate.  That was before I even started knitting it.

This week I finished the sleeves . . .

and sewed it all together.

Then I put it on Jesse – who is a size 8 – the same size as the jacket – and the fit was horrible!!!  The armhole opening begins about two inches down the arm so the sleeves don’t fit right – and they pull the jacket right off of the wearer.  I am going to get a frog closure tomorrow but I am not sure it will help.  The yarn is fairly slippery (being a ribbon yarn) and the fall of the curve may place the closure too low to be functional.

I am grumpy as I may end up trashing the entire project.  And it was alot of time and money and effort and I am just grumpy!!

So here is the lowdown on this pattern and this yarn for my knitting friends who read this blog for just this reason.

The idea of the pattern is really cool and alot of folks have used the circle design for creating jackets and shrugs.  Without sleeves it held promise and Chip has considered using this design for some soft leather vests.

The armholes, while easy to create in that it just requires binding off 33 stitches along the bottom edge of the opening and casting 33 stitches back on at the top of the opening – were uneven as the cast on stitches were much looser and were more difficult to align when sewing in the sleeve than the bound off half of the opening.

The yarn made this a worse project than it had to be because it would catch and fray on everything.  I used to play guitar so the tips of my fingers on my left hand still are calloused – so everytime my left hand touched the fabric it frayed.  And the light blue ribbon would just come apart leaving gaps.  Also the darker blue ribbons were much thinner than the lighter blue portions of the ribbon, causing continual waving in the fabric and along the edges of the sleeves.  Bad.

The sleeve pattern made the sleeves very short.  We added two inches to the sleeves and could have gone 1-2 inches longer.  You should also do the beginning few rows in a garter stitch as the end of the sleeve rolls up.  Be careful ironing this yarn also as it is very nylon-y.

On the whole, I am very disappointed with this entire pattern from Berroco.  This yarn should never have been made much less recommended for a kid’s pattern.  There should have been more thought put into the sleeve placement to address the shoulder (or lack thereof) issue.  Lets hope that the Aidez pattern works out better since I already bought the yarn for it.  Wishing all my crafty friends a more productive week than I had.