sunrise #2: done, but needs buttons

I’m sorry I’ve been relatively silent lately, at least as far as the knitting content goes. Because I was redoing the Sunrise Circle Jacket, progress shots seemed useless; they would look the same as the progress shots I took for the first one!

First let me thank you all so much for your kind words and sympathy over the bathroom crisis I had last week. When I got home from yoga, my boyfriend had mopped the entire first floor. I worked from home on Friday so I stripped the couch cushions of their covers and ran the covers through the wash. I ended up washing them twice; the first time they came out still looking dingy from the rusty water and years of accumulated grime. The couch is like new now! Nothing seems to have been irreversibly damaged, though the boy broke our lamp while mopping, so today we walked to Ikea and bought a new one. But back to knitting:

Knitting this jacket has taken longer than the first one I did, mostly because of other commitments. It’s all done except . . . I don’t want to put the buttons on without having some kind of fitting with my mom (for whom this is a mother’s day gift) directly. The sweater is still just a tad too small for me to wear comfortably (now I know what size to make for myself!), so I can’t really make a good guess.

Still, I’m very very happy with the results. (Sorry for the low quality photos; it’s late, our apartment is dark, and this is the best I can do.)

Pattern: Sunrise Circle Jacket from Interweave Knits; participated in the knitalong.
Yarn: KnitPicks’s Wool of the Andes in Fern
Balls: Bought 9, used all; have probably 1/2 ball leftover
Needles: US size 7; used a circular throughout
Size: S (35″)
Started: Monday, May 8
Finished: Sunday, May 21 (buttons will have to happen later)
Notes: This is, as I’ve mentioned, the second Sunrise I’ve made for my mom. The first turned out to be too small. I went up one size and made a few other modifications:

• The k2togtbls were all made as ssks, wherein I essentially slipped both stitches knitwise and then knit into the back loops. But I did it by wrapping the yarn backward on the purl row before each decrease row, so that I only had to knit into the back loops of the twisted stitches to get the same result. See my experiments with left-leaning decreases here. (I didn’t try slip 1, knit 1, psso, but whatever, I’m happy with these results.) The arc on the right front is now a million times nicer and more professional looking than the straightforward k2togtbl.
• I knit the two fronts first, mostly because it’s nice to have all that shaping to keep me occupied. (I did this for the first one, too.)
• When I knit the back, I did not do the double decreases (and double increases) the pattern calls for. I felt the result in the first sweater was too flared, so I did single decreases (k2tog then k2togtbl, in that order). I also knit more rows in the space between shaping, so I’d have the exact same number of rows for the back body as I had for the sunrise shaping on the fronts (72 rows). When I made the first one, the sides didn’t match up quite right; I had to fudge it a little to get it sewn up. In order to cut down on any flare as well as to make my life easier, I made sure to have the same number of rows for the back. It worked out great, and the seaming was a breeze.
• As before, I knit down the bottom hems as I worked, but I sewed the other hems post-blocking. I sewed the seams before I did the hems, and I think it was easier the other way around (to hem before seaming), but it was not a big deal.

I’m going to cannibalize the first Sunrise to nab those buttons for this one. I don’t know that all 4 are necessary—that top one would probably never be buttoned anyway. I’m debating sending the sweater to mom with the buttons and extra yarn for her to attach herself (mom is an accomplished knitter, after all), but that does seem a little crappy, to give her a gift that she has to finish herself! I’m not sure when I’m going to see her next, though, so if she wants a jacket with buttons, she may have to suck it up :)

In other news, my stat counter is broken—I spent all day astonished that not a single person had visited my blog. Now, I don’t fancy myself a biggie in the world of knit blogging—not by a longshot—but I get a standard, base amount of visits. So I turned off the cookie that blocks my own visits, clicked around, and woah! no activity present. I can’t figure out what has happened—the other blog I track has had activity today. I reinstalled the code and am hoping there’s just some delay in transmittal. I hadn’t realized quite how much I’d come to depend on seeing the little bar graph of visitors every day. I miss it. Sniff.

Edited to add a better photo, that better shows off the jacket’s color: