Betrayal of Grenyrn

Screw knitting. It’s a fickle mistress and I’ve freaking had it. I’ve just about finished the Grenyrn sweater, finished enough to baste together the shoulder seams and find out that I’m SCREWED.

The *&^%$ing sweater doesn’t fit. It doesn’t. This time I refuse to accept that it is not personal. I know, I know. I talk all the time about how you can’t let this stuff get to you. That gauge and knitting and patterns and all of that is all just for fun and you have to take your lumps and I’ve even waxed poetic about how knitting is consequence free and how it’s the only time you’ll make mistakes that don’t count and it’s LIES. ALL LIES. Last night when the panoptic nature of the sweaters betrayal was revealed to me I threw a complete hissy fit. This sweater is out to get me and I think the yarn is in on it too.

The bust is too small, even though, in what is possibly a first for me, I have effortlessly achieved both stitch and row gauge to perfection.

Stitchgaugegrenyrn2

Grenyrnrowgag3

Not perfection on some lying stinking swatch, but perfection in the actual knitted garment. Stitch and row gauge. How often does that happen? Wasted. Spectacular gauge accuracy, wasted.

Since my gauge is right but the sweater bust is wrong, I’m willing to consider….

Bustthesamegrn2

Nope. My bust is the same as it was a week ago. I have not gained several cup sizes in a week.

In addition to the bust being too small, the arms are too short. This really ticks me off. I have shortened the sleeves of every sweater that I have ever knitted. Due to the somewhat petite nature of my arms – (Fine. They are stumpy.) I routinely whack 5-8cm off of my sleeves. All the time. Every sweater. Always. Forever.

This time (perhaps sensing the duplicitous plan of the sweater) I only subtracted about 3cm. It would piss me off royally if the sleeves were now 3cm too short, but it has incensed me to vicious purple wrath that they are actually about 7cm too short. This means that they wouldn’t have worked even if I hadn’t tried to fix them.

In case you were thinking that anything about the sweater was working, the torso is also too short. I suspected this too. I kept holding it up and saying “Hey Joe, doesn’t this look short?” and then Joe would say “Baby, you look short” – and I would keep knitting. Fool.

Trust your instincts, that’s what I always say, and my instincts said “You are getting jerked around by a sweater. Stop now.” but did I stop? No, no. I knit faster, since you know…You can outrun truth.

Grenyrnnot3

The whole thing is too small. Way too freaking small. Given the style of construction, there’s absolutely no way to fix this and the only way out is a complete, right back to the beginning, cast on again, not one stitch saved “do-over”. Except there are some things that I haven’t told you. Some things about how I knit this that may have been a little obsessive and weird, and some of those things may make it a little bit hard to yank this out and start over.

It may have been, for example, that I might have duplicate stitched over part of the torso to make the stripes match better. (Yes. I know. I like things to go my way and I’m not afraid of insane measures to get there.) Also, considering that the rows on the arms are three times longer than the torso, I took some measures to see to it that the stripe sequence stayed the same even though the row length had changed. “Some measures” may have included splicing the green sections and striping sections of three balls together to make a “superball” with sections three times longer for rows that are three times longer. There were other things. Worse things. Things that are going to be bad now that I have to yank it out. Very bad.

I’m trying to decide if I’m angry enough to have revenge, determined enough to fix it, stupid enough to try, or smart enough to find a smaller person to give this to. Damn. I can’t believe Grenyrn did this to me. I love this sweater – or at least I think I would. If it loved me back.