WIP Wednesday: The Cursed Honeybee

This sweater....

This has been quite the saga making this sweater. It was technically finished, but I had to fix something, so it's sitting in the naughty corner and waiting for me to have the nerve to CUT MY KNITTING. It started off with other problems though...

Sometime last fall, I was knitting away and having a lovely time when I noticed a big, gaping hole in the lace work. It seems I dropped a stitch about 6 inches down from the point I was at, but it held together well enough that I didn't notice for all that time. I tried doing surgery by dropping down in those stitches, but try as I might, I just couldn't figure out how to replicate the honeybee pattern after the fact since the mistake was over so many rows. I just accepted defeat and unpicked all 6 inches of work and did it again...

Fast forward to January. I decided to really buckle down and finish this sweater after setting it aside for holiday gift making. I was at the sleeves and knit one up fairly quickly, but a little over halfway through the second sleeve I started to notice the looked different. I set the finished one on top of the one I was working on and saw that the second sleeve was quite a bit wider than the first. I did some counting and discovered that the first sleeve had too few stitches - which explained why it was a tad bit snug. After being annoyed with myself, I decided to just unpick the first sleeve and redo it, which I did, and then I moved on to the yoke shaping.

Lovely, right? I finished the body with just this tiny ball of yarn left. I knew it wouldn't be enough to do the button bands and the neckband, so I went to Hobby Lobby to see if they had anything that would work. I was extremely skeptical since this was a hand dyed yarn from a fancy brand - but to my amazement they had a darker tone from the sweater in a set of 6 balls of yarn. I snapped it up and knitted the bands.

I blocked the sweater in prep for finishing off the button bands with petersham ribbon like I always do - I even had the perfect color green for the ribbon - amazing! I tried the sweater on after blocking to check everything was good before doing the ribbon and ...

The sleeves were both too long and too short. I seriously had measured them before attaching them to the body, but somehow in the knitting and blocking of everything together, they wound up too short to be long sleeves and too long to be elbow sleeves. It just came out at a very unfortunate length. This happened a month ago. I was very cocky and decided I would just unpick the sleeve cuff and reknit the ribbing to be shorter, no biggie, but when I unpicked and the cuff just wouldn't unravel, I remembered that this sleeve was knit from the cuff upward, so I was trying to unravel the cast on edge :/

So the sweater still sits. Just this week I finally searched "how to unpick knitting from cast on edge" and the lovely Roxanne Richardson had a great video on how to do what I want to do, but it requires cutting into my knitting where I want to shorten at. I'll confess that I'm a bit nervous about that, so I have been putting it off. I have steeked a sweater before, but that was after sewing a zig zag stitch over the knit stitches, you know? Not just trusting that I cut the right spot. It's like bomb diffusion for knitters. 

Anyway, I'm sharing this today to light a fire under myself to actually get this done. I have everything I need to finish this - buttons and all - just waiting for their time. Ironically, with the several inches I will be removing from the sleeves, I probably did have enough yarn to knit the bands with. I may weigh all that up after I've fixed the sleeves and possibly knit the bands again? Ugh. This just feels never ending. I'm hoping to have it done before the one year anniversary of starting this project, which is May 1st, but we shall see. I'll be happy to finish this one just so I can move on with my life, lol.

Stay tuned for the results soon!