A Love Knit Up

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Gauge woes

(I know this is the second post today and I should be working on my thesis. Shut up.)

I just want to tell all of you (who are not reading this) about my Streakers shrug. You know, the one I posted about a couple of times? (I know that I don't have photographs. I should. Just another thing to do in my "copious free time.") Well, I finished knitting it, and I blocked it, and I sewed it up. And Houston? We have a problem.

My gauge swatches were fine. My measurements while I knit were fine. The shrug looks fine. Except... it is a little wide. Like, 8 inches. And the sleeves? They're a little narrow... like, by two inches. How, you may ask, was it possible for this to happen, given that I knitted so carefully? Well, I think it was in the blocking. The pattern said to steam block. I have several problems with steam blocking, namely (a) I don't have an iron and (b) I don't have an ironing board and (c) I don't have room to put it all even if I did have them. So I wet-blocked. (Ok, you can come out from under the table. I know it was dumb.) I should have pinned everything out into shape, gotten a spray bottle, and wet-blocked that way. But, of course, I didn't. Instead, I just dunked the whole thing in the shower... and it stretched. In the wrong direction. And made my sleeves too long and too narrow. Somehow. This has never happened to me before. I have never even heard of this happening before. Does stockinette randomly stretch horizontally and shrink vertically? Apparently it does, at least when it really wants to piss me off.

If you hear of a really tall person with either really long thin arms or a really wide back, please tell me.

(The shrug is, actually, wearable. It's just a little more uncomfortable than it should be...)

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