01.02.08
Finished Object: Henley Perfected
Unless you’re going to to hold me to a technicality concerning the buying and sewing on of buttons, on New Year’s Eve I finished one last sweater for the Year of Sweaters!
Pattern: Henley Perfected, from the winter 2007 issue of Interweave Knits, smallest size.
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, somewhere between 8 and 9 balls, I’m guessing.
Needles: Size 3 Addi Turbos and size 4 Knitpicks Options
Began: November 11, 2007
Finished: December 31, 2007
Notes: Okay, here’s the thing. I have some notes, but not many. What I do have many of is photos. This sweater loves the camera. (Or perhaps more accurately, I love this sweater and, apparently, taking pictures of myself.) So I have three choices: 1) limit the number of photos so it’s commensurate with the amount of text I have, 2) make the post very photo-heavy because I can’t choose, or 3) put up lots of photos but generate virtually content-less text just to fill up space and make it look balanced. Longtime readers of my blog know that I am a fervent adherent of option three. As a New Year’s resolution, however, I am going to attempt to limit pointless prattle and just stick with the essentials. At the end of the post we can review how I did.
I know I say this after every project, but this is my favorite sweater I’ve ever made. I loved the pattern the instant I laid eyes on it. (Oddly, that’s not always the reason I’ve chosen patterns in the past. For example, although I loved knitting the Cable-Down Raglan, it’s not the sort of thing I would ever pick out at the store. It just happened to call for the right amount of the right weight of yarn and offer some of the knitting elements I happened to be in the mood for (cables and no seaming).) Not so with the Henley Perfected. I did not simply want to knit this sweater; I wanted to have this sweater.
When I realized that I could reclaim the yarn from my rejected Gatsby Girl Pullover, there was nothing to stop me from casting on almost immediately. Incidentally, therein lay one of the few frustrations in an otherwise smooth-sailing project. I frogged the half-finished Gatsby Girl, carefully skeined and washed the yarn to remove the kinks, hung it to dry, and wound it into balls. That was all it took for it to start fraying in several places. Any time I had to reknit a portion of the Henley Perfected, I threw away the yarn I’d frogged because I didn’t think it would hold up well to another round of knitting. Fortunately I had enough yarn to do that, but it does make me worried about the long-term durability of this sweater. I’m afraid this one is also destined for a vacuum-sealed bag in a climate controlled, air-tight chamber. Appealing though it may be in many ways, I think I may have used DB Cashmerino for the last time.
Other than that, I had few problems. The pattern was very clearly written and I can’t think of any changes I made at all. My only general criticisms of the finished garment are that the sleeves are a little too short and the bust is a little too tight (I usually go for a decent amount of negative ease because handknits stretch so much over time and I’d rather they not be baggy, but I forgot that with buttons running down the front, a too-tight fit can create the impression that the wearer is about to bust out, if you know what I mean. I don’t think the effect is scandalously extreme here, but an extra inch of circumference probably would have been better.)
The buttons, by the way, are from JoAnn Fabrics, which I must say continues to impress me with its button selection. (Support your local small businesses everyone! Do not do as I do!)
Finally, the one complaint I have about the actual pattern itself is that the stockinette button bands, unsurprisingly, have a pretty serious curling tendency. I appalled the knitting gods by spraying them with starch and ironing them through a pillowcase, which helped a lot, but I think someone more ambitious than I could probably come up with a pattern edit that eliminated the problem at the source. Although do you think it’s just cognitive dissonance if I say that the curling is kind of growing on me?
(This photo, by the way, is in black and white because the color cast was crappy. This violates my strict belief that bad photos cannot be made into good or artsy photos just by turning them black and white; in fact, the lack of contrast here makes this a pretty lousy black and white photo, too. For some reason I like the composition, though (plus I had some fun playing with the Picnik editing tools in Flickr — oops, too much vingetting), so here it is anyway, along with an earful of my opinions on photo editing.)
Ladies and gentlemen, thus endeth my year of thweaters. It was neither an abysmal failure nor a resounding success. You’d think that I might have learned a lesson about the hazards of year-long knitting themes, but I’m already weighing my options for 2008. My year-in-review and year-ahead post is forthcoming. That’s right, you can hardly wait.
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Let’s see, how did I do with not prattling on vacuously just to fill space? Well, I’ve certainly posted much longer things than this in the past. On the other hand, you probably didn’t need all that nonsense about my opinions on black and white photos. Or even really any of this nonsense about my pratting tendencies (ooh, meta prattle!). All in all, I’d say I merit nothing better than a C-minus on my short-lived resolution.
