Sigh. What should have been the most straightforward and fast sweater for Matt has turned out to be a bit of a pain. I’m making him an Ease, adapting it to have a narrower neck, no waist curve, and shorter ribbing at the bottom and cuffs. Simple, right? Almost all stockinette with only 2% thinking necessary. Well, somebody (me) got cocky about not needing a gauge swatch, while at the same time going up a needle size. This made the body huge, but of course I didn’t have Matt try it on until it was 10 inches past the armpit. It was 5.5 inches too large. Matt asked how long I thought the sweater might last and I said maybe 10 years. He said, “Well I’ll probably get fatter.” It was very sweet of him, but I preferred him to have a sweater he could wear now, and this is also a man that can eat half and half on cereal and whatever else he wants and not gain weight, so I’m not holding my breath on that one. I rrrrrripped back to a few increases before separating the sleeves. At long last I finished the body.

Then I moved onto the sleeves, going along with the decreases in the original pattern, not giving a thought to how the numbers differed or where I wanted the width to end up until I was about 2 inches before the ribbing for the cuffs, knitting along as fast as I could so I could finish this on Christmas Day. Then I took a good look at the suckers and realized how crazy wide the sleeves were compared to his other sweaters. He tried them on. He was nice about it. I finished and blocked it anyway, just to make sure. Annnnnddd…somehow that didn’t make the sleeves magically narrower or better. From the elbows down it just looked like some wings. I probably should have taken a picture of this for documentation and later amusement (I’m not ready to laugh about it yet). Instead, I resigned myself to ripping out 2/3 of the sleeves. ease ripI had him try it on again, holding back my tears (ok, slight exaggeration), and I marked with the stitch marker where the sleeves needed to get drastically narrower. To quickly amend the wings, I decided I would go down a needle size. This time I’ve done some math, so I know if I want him to have approximately 9.5 inch cuffs, I’m going to make about 10 more decreases, one every inch or so. I’m doing both at once so they’ll match perfectly. I think this will fix everything, and if not, I guess I can just force him to wear it or burn the damn thing. ease rip-2Here I go again.

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