Ready for Cozy Weather

The polar vortex of July that we've been having this week has prompted me to wear light sweaters, it seems very strange to me. However,  it has also meant that when I did finish and block my new sweater, I could try it on without instantly getting heat stroke.

I finished my Cozy Flax! I was so annoyed with myself when I actually sat down with the second sleeve and remembered that one of the major instructions is "knit straight for 8""  Autopilot knitting anyone?

Tada!


To give you an idea of how the body changed once I put in 4" of shaping, here's the picture from before I ripped back to just below the bra line.



Again, that isn't a complaint about the pattern. Tin Can Knits wrote an excellent and very easy to follow pattern and the sweater in it's straight format would have looked just fine over a pair of jeans.

The other modifications I made were to the amount of ribbing. This sweater is ending around my hips and I didn't want it to roll or just stretch out a bit at the bottom, so I went with about 4" of ribbing instead of the pattern called for 1.5"



I did something similar with the sleeves--switching to ribbing at the bottom of the sleeve while still maintaining the garter decorative part instead of going down to ribbing at the bottom of the sleeve.



I wet blocked it, though not aggressively. I didn't see a need for pins here, just mostly to soak it and see what would happen.  As I expected, the sleeves grew a little in length. That actually turned out for the best, I'd finished the sleeves just a hair shorter that I wanted, so now they're a good length. They'll be shoved up to 3/4 length most of the time anyway, where that ribbing will come in handy, or I'll want the longer sleeves because I'm outside. I think I might go back and put in a couple of lines of crochet anchoring between the shoulders, ala Yarn Harlot, because I could see it stretching out there as well.

Overall, though, it's ready for tailgates and walks to the farmer's market this fall.  It's a very casual sweater, I don't see myself wearing it with much beyond jeans, but I like that about it.  My only other complaint is that it only took about 800 yards of yarn. Normally, that'd be a point of celebration, but with stash dash, I was seriously hoping for closer to 1000 yards.  Must knit other things faster...