March 14, 2006
FLAK Update
I am making regular progress on my FLAK sweater. I now have the front and back completed and have started the first sleeve.I continue to learn new techniques as I work through this knit along. I decided to add a horseshoe cable and twist on each side of the center braid in the sleeve. The sleeves are knit from the top down and you pick up stitches along the side of the front and back and knit down to the cuff. Since the stitch gauge of the moss stitch filler is different than the gauge across the horseshoe cable and twist, I computed different stitch pick up rate for the two sections of the sleeve. Surprisingly enough, it looks like I figured it out correctly and there is no puckering along the pickup line. Now, hopefully I'll compute the rate of decrease for the sleeves correctly!
March 12, 2006
Entrelac Woes
I nearly finished my entrelac sweater. I almost could claim victory. It was in sight. Alas, no. 
After completing everything but a few stockinette rows for the neckline, I tried on the sweater. Yuck! The arm holes aren't deep enough and bind at my upper arms. In addition, the stiffness of the entrelac emphasizes the bunching under the arms that occurs with drop shoulder style sleeves. So, it's back to the drawing board. I'm going to take the sweater apart, pull out the edge rectangles along the armhole and add new side triangles to create a modified drop shoulder style sleeve. Then, I'm going to rip back about 8 inches on the sleeves and reknit them to be larger. Although it's disappointing to have gotten this far and still have more work to do, the sweater is so beautiful that I don't mind the work.
After completing everything but a few stockinette rows for the neckline, I tried on the sweater. Yuck! The arm holes aren't deep enough and bind at my upper arms. In addition, the stiffness of the entrelac emphasizes the bunching under the arms that occurs with drop shoulder style sleeves. So, it's back to the drawing board. I'm going to take the sweater apart, pull out the edge rectangles along the armhole and add new side triangles to create a modified drop shoulder style sleeve. Then, I'm going to rip back about 8 inches on the sleeves and reknit them to be larger. Although it's disappointing to have gotten this far and still have more work to do, the sweater is so beautiful that I don't mind the work.