Sesame progress

I’ve finally finished knitting all the pieces of Sesame. I’ve finished the back, both fronts, and even conquered sleeve island. I’ve even weaved in some of the ends, and ‘seamed’ the shoulder seams (using three-needle bind off), and blocked all the pieces.

(By the way, this here is the down side of doing fair-isle flat in rows as opposed to in the rounds. Ughh!!)

All that’s left to do now is to pick up stitches around the neck and knit the collar, pick up stitches along the two fronts for the buttonbands, set in the sleeves, and seam up the sleeves and sides.

Last night I made some progress on the collar. But not without a little horror story of my own… I was counting the number of stitches around the neck just before I pick up the stitches, and to my horror, I found that the right front has six more rows than the left front! This was an excess of almost 3cm (a bit over 1 inch). How could I not notice that before?!? Well… it turned out that when I blocked the thing, I blocked it after doing the shoulder seams. And I managed to overlook the fact that the top bit of the right front was folded to the back. I didn’t notice the length difference then. I guess this is why a ‘proper’ blocking board with the grids would’ve been handy.

So what to do? First I thought, well… maybe I can just leave it and still pick up the same number of stitches on the right neck front as the left, and hopefully the extra length would get pulled up after I knit the collar on. I wasn’t so keen on unravelling the three needle bind-off and then frogging. But then again I thought, am I a Knitter or am I a knitter?? I just knew that if this doesn’t get fixed then I wouldn’t be able to live with it. I mean hey, if I want a cardigan that I can feel good about (and show off!), then I’d better do it properly. Right?

So I bit the bullet. I picked out the ends that I weaved in, and unravelled the three needle bind off. Halfway through the unravelling, as I see those live stitches coming off, I suddenly panicked, “oh no, what have I done??” So what did I do? Take a picture of course. Ha!

But once the wayward front had been surgically removed successfully from the back, I could breathe again. I frogged the extra rows…

… did the three needle bind off again…

… and then all is well.

So now Sesame is looking like this.

I still have quite a bit to go on the collar. And I’m a bit nervous about setting in the sleeves as I’ve never done a set-in sleeve garment before. But here’s hoping that it will all go well!