finished Rogue pics, pretty fair isle pics

EDIT: Please let me know if the pictures appear stretched in weird ways. For some reason they look weird in Safari, but not in Firefox. Comments on this appreciated. Thanks!

Here are the Rogue pictures!







Those are the best modeled shots I could manage on my own. It's really hard to take a good photo of myself in this sweater that actually shows off the sweater well. Those of you who have been following the progress already know that the first picture is the most color accurate. The bathroom lighting completely washed out the color on the modeled shots.

specs

• pattern: Rogue hooded pullover, from the girl from auntie, 39" size
  
• yarn: Clasgens worsted weight wool (though I'd definitely classify it more as an aran weight). I think the color I used was "delft blue".
  
• pattern alterations: I followed the pattern to the word, for the most part. I chose the twisted stockinette hem option, although I shortened the hem length to just 1" for the sleeves. I also added a few rows to each sleeve, right before the caps, since I think my row gauge was a tiny big tight by then. Other than that, I can't think of anything I did differently.
  

The seaming process was the smoothest I've done, so far. It helps that this is the largest gauge sweater I've knit, I think. (Actually, the gauge may be the same as the BPT cardigan, but that required no seaming.) Even doing the set in sleeves was pretty easy. I followed the pattern and made sure that things were sized correctly while blocking, and it all fit together perfectly. There was no need to "ease" things into place. I just started pinning in the sleeves, and lo and behold, everything fit and lined up perfectly. This was the first time I seamed the sleeves together before attaching them to the body, instead of after. I think it's only a coincidence that the setting in process was so easy this time, as having the sleeves in tube form did make it more awkward to pin and sew them into place. I'm not sure that I'll use that order of operations again.

The hems were much less trouble than I thought they might be. I decided to just go ahead and try the Clasgens for them, and it wasn't too thick to do the job well. I just whip stitched the hems, going through the back loops on the wrong side of the sweater. It looks just fine, and like it does in the picture, so I suppose that was a good way to do it.


And now for the fair isle. Since I'm still searching for extra yarn for the vest, I started working on the mittens first. I've been knitting them "inside out", to make sure the floats between the needles don't get pulled too tight. It's kind of a pain compared to the way I usually knit with DPNs, but I'm starting to get used to it. My tension isn't perfect, but it will block out to be beautiful, if I can figure out how to block mittens well. Note that in the picture below, I'm wearing the right mitten on my left hand. That way I could show off the presence of a thumb hole and still take a picture with my right hand. I tried to take a shot with my left hand, with the mitten properly on my right hand, but that just wasn't going to happen.



Also notice how I'm actually using all the background colors in the pattern, instead of going the lazy route and just doing the background in one color. I asked A. for his opinion, and he thought that two different colored mittens (as I'd probably have to use two separate colors for solid backgrounds if I did that) would look silly, and if I was really doing them for the process of doing them, I should go all the way. While I don't think fraternal mittens would look all that funny, I do think that multicolored cuffs with monochrome background hands would look a bit weird. Plus, I started to feel bad about taking the easy route for the background. So I bit the bullet and am doing all of the background color changes. This makes the project less portable, but more pretty.