Too Lazy to Take a Better Picture

But as you can see, I’ve been knitting.

This is my Aleita Shell. I’ve got to say, this is a mentally challenging pattern. There are lots of things going on at the same time when you get to the bodice – increases at the side seams, decreases at the neck edge, decreases on both wrong sides and right sides, armhole bindoff and shaping… it’s hard to keep track of it all.

I should have been smarter and charted it all out to begin with, but I was too smug. But then I got to a place where things just didn’t seem to line up right, so I had to chart it out anyway to figure out where the problem was (a decrease where there shouldn’t be one on the left front armhole shaping).  I could just take out the last decrease and call it good, but it’s not really that many rows, so I’ll rip it back.

But otherwise, it’s going pretty well. The pattern has you do the bottom ribbing with a needle 3 sizes smaller than used for the body. Noticing that a lot of people had problems with the hem rolling, I only went down two, and maybe I should only have gone done one. We’ll see after it’s blocked. I’m counting on the linen content of the yarn to make it work.

Although there’s no errata for this pattern that I could find, the instructions tell you to do the slipped stitch edging by slipping purlwise with the yarn in back. As I discovered (and later saw in a bunch of Ravelry projects), you have to slip with the yarn in front when working on the WS. Either this is an error, or I’m wrong about what “with yarn in back” means. If it means “behind the work”, it’s an error. If it means “on the back (wrong side) of the fabric”, then I’ve always misunderstood it.

I’m planning to totally ignore the instructions for the neckband. It has you bind off the neck stitches, then knit a neckband (working upwards on the 3 stitches at each edge of the front), and sew it on, grafting the ends together. The heck with that – I’m going leave the stitches live and do an I-cord edging.