I'd liked the Breathing Space sweater by Veera Valimaki and a friend kindly gifted me the pattern. I swatched and washed the swatch and was happy with it, so I was good to go.
The yoke knitted up quite quickly and before long I was joining in the contrast, multi-coloured yarn and this is where things got 'interesting', meaning that although I like the sweater (and received compliments when I wore it yesterday to knitting group), I don't love it yet.
The construction is clever, with short rows starting mid-bust, which create the diagonal striping. Another friend recommended German Short Rows so I looked those up online, used them and was really pleased with how easy they are to do and how neat they look compared to other methods (one of my traditionally-done short rows at the neckline flopped and looked baggy, so I ended up pulling up a loop of yarn to tighten it up and tacking it down when I did sewing in of ends).
Once I'd done the short row section it was a case of going round and round, knitting two-round stripes in each yarn, doing some waist shaping on one side and increasing on the other side every 8th round, like in the short-row section. Hang on a minute, I thought. What increase on every 8th round? I'd mis-read the pattern and not done that part, so I ripped back to the beginning of the short rows (the Drops Delight doesn't really like to be ripped back very much, being a singles yarn, so I had to go slowly) and did them again.
A couple of days later I was back going round and round again, doing the waist shaping and the 8th round increases and, when I got to the end of one ball of yarn, I decided to put the body stitches on waste yarn and do the sleeves (I wanted to get those done so I could use the remaining yarn to knit the body as long as I wanted or until the yarn ran out as I thought I might not have enough). One on the waste yarn, I smoothed the stitches out and had a look at progress so far. Hmmm; that looks rather wide I thought. So, I tried it on. And.... it was HUGE! If I'd carried on, I could have pegged it out and slept in it (well, not really, but I'm sure you get my drift).
Guess what I did next?
Yep! I ripped it back to the start of the short-row shaping - again. Then I had a look at the examples on Ravelry and had a ponder for a day or two before making a decision on how to take this forward.
Bracing myself (and vowing that this was it's last chance; if it didn't work out after this, it was going into the bin) I started the short-row section for a third time, but this time, I only did half the increases across the mid-bust section that the pattern stated and once I got to the round and round bit, I didn't do any waist shaping or further increases, which gave a narrower sillhouette. In hindsight, I could have put in some increases on the left side, but only every 20 or so rounds, but overall I'm happy with the sweater and the fabric the yarn's made is nice to wear.
It's just that it turned out to be much less straightforward than it should have been and I'm still at the stage of being slightly resentful that I wasted several hours knitting and re-knitting.
I'm currently knitting a Victorian Lace Scarf (a Franklin Habit/Makers Mercantile knitalong*), another pair of socks for DD2 and have some spindle-spinning on the go, but I bought a new sweater pattern today - Granito by Joji Locatelli. I'm going to use some hand-spun yarn for it and once it's finished drying, I'll be swatching**.
* I'll post about that soon.
** If I've got the right needles as I think the ones I want are being used for the Victorian Scarf!
