WIP Wednesday: Everything's Coming Up Roses

This project has absolutely fought me ever step of the way. I'm participating in the Nosegay Vest Knit Along and using it as my first intarsia project. I have to show how it looks now only to say that you wouldn't believe how it looked last night in comparison.

I finished the colorwork section on Sunday night and I was elated - it was quite the process and took me several hours to do, so when I reached the end I triumphantly posted it to instagram. Then I kept knitting and things started to look ... weird... The photo on the pattern showed very minimal space between the flower and the neckline, but suddenly mine had several inches of the main color in between. I started reading and re-reading the pattern, only to have it finally click that I was supposed to do the armhole bind off and shaping about 1/3rd into the color work - not after it. I was so depressed! The instructions are very minimal since the pattern was released through Knit Picks instead of by Andi herself (who always includes lost and lots of information - most of her patterns are at least 6 to 8 pages long), and it had to fit into the Knit Picks format - this pattern is only 3 pages long, one of which is the measurements and 3/4 of another is the color chart. So basically all the instructions are on one page. Now that I read it again, I see where I messed up, but I still feel like it was a reasonable mistake considering I've never done color work before and I've never made a vest so I'm not totally sure of their construction.

Anyway, this major error meant that I had to figure out how to fix it. Not only did I not want to pull out all that intarsia work, I was also pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to. It was a mess on the back with all my stranding, and I had already cut the excess yarn off. Instead I decided to put my Craftsy class  to good use and try dropping down to where the shaping needed to be and adding in the shaping. My nice edges quickly went from neat and tidy to a stringy mess, but after a few hours of work and lots of tugging at the long strands, I ended up with the fairly decent looking front that you see above. If this vest wasn't designed to be seamed together, this would not have been possible, but since it is I am fairly confident that I will be able to hide all that mess and end up with something at least wearable.

So here's a little trip down memory lane. This was when I first started the color. I had just discovered how to make butterflies of yarn so I didn't have a zillion skeins all twisted up, and things still looked nice and tidy.

Soon after, I ended up with this crazed mess, lol. I can't tell you how many times I had to untangle all this hullabaloo. But I endured, and ended up with this:

This was the picture I posted on Instagram before I discovered my mistake. At first I was very nervous about how much stranding I had to do. The Craftsy Intarsia class tells you not to strand but to make a separate butterfly of yarn for each section of color - I quickly realized this really was not possible for this design. I asked Andi how many balls of color she had used, and she wrote a whole blog post to answer my question! I thought that was so nice of her. She shows a photo of the back of her swatch in the post and I have to say it made me feel so much better about my own work. She had lots of stranding - granted it was quite a bit neater than my own, but once I get my ends woven in I'm sure it will be much better. 

So now my flower looks like this. I will say I did pull my changes a little too tight in a few places, but I'm hoping I can try to loosen things up as I weave in. I find that if I stretch the whole vest vertically, the stitches even out much better. This is good news since my issue now is that it's going to be pretty short. Ah well, at least it's supposed to go over something else when worn so I think it will still be ok, but you can bet I will be stretching this baby to the max when I block it.

So that's really been my whole focus craft-wise this week, which feels like total slacking compared to all the sewing projects I've posted the last little while. This has been quite a lot of work though! So if you'd like to get your fill of other people's projects, head over to Gracey's Goodies and check things out!