Time Out for Audrey
I was hoping to post something about attaching the lace band to the body of Audrey. However, Audrey and I are not on speaking terms right at the moment. After spending several hours trying to figure out how to join the lace to the top and do this in a way that looked acceptable to me I decided to give up for a while. I spent a lot of time looking at the pictures in the Rowan magazine, looking and the successful sweaters on the Audrey blog, trying to understand the right balance of lace repeats and just how much the lace should be stretched and combining that with attaching the lace to the body in a tidy fashion.
And nothing worked the way I wanted it to.
I am actually considering re-knitting the lace and attaching it to the body of Audrey as I go. But I am not yet ready to tackle that yet, so Audrey has been put aside while I consider the best course.
In the meantime, I decided to move up a couple of needle sizes and get started on Butterfly. Even though I have a pretty good feel for how Kureyon knits up, I decided to be a good little knitter and swatch, just to make sure. Soaking the swatch in water and letting it dry did have the effect of loosening it up just a bit and softening up the Kureyon quite a lot.
So far, the chevron pattern is a nice balance of interesting and mindless. I can actually work on it and watch John's jungle mercenary progress.
I'm enjoying the color progression of the Kureyon a lot. Amazing how a simple texture pattern can change the whole character of the yarn. I've been wondering how this pattern might work in socks with a striping sock yarn. Could be kind of interesting, I think!
What I did for Audrey is this: I knit the neckband, seamed the ends together (so it was a circle), and then pinned it to the top of the sweater like so: align the seam with one of the back shoulder seams, align the opposite end of the neck band with the shoulder seam diagonal from the one you've already pinned it to, then pin it at the halfway point on each side.
From there, I just sort of winged it as far as seaming it up - I just aimed to have it match up at the 4 places I'd pinned the neckband to the sweater.
I hope this helps. You're almost done! Don't give up now!
I was worried about sewing the neck edge on right, too. The post on the Audrey-along by Maud called 'The neck edge" (way down the list) was helpful to me, esp. the comment she made further down to explain more. Dawn's idea is also a good one, to sew the neckband together so it's one loop. I can't wait to see one in blue--looks lovely! :o)
What helped me was dividing the lace repeats into sections. I did 18 repeats, so I distributed them as such: Three lace repeats for one shoulder, 6 for the front, three for the other shoulder and 6 for the back. I sewed the little garter bumps to whole stiches at the cast-off edge of the neck, skipping over stitches every once in a while in order to maintain an even distribution of lace repeats.
OR, you could leave Audrey as is to show off those fabulous shoulders and make John wriggle his eyebrows. (Hee!)
Butterfly socks, hmmmm? Interesting.
I found that with the Audrey neckband, you need to stretch it an awful lot more than you might think. Joining in a loop sounds like a good idea to help it stretch evenly.
Thank you everone so far on the neckband comments. I think I'm just going to have to learn to be more patient with this stuff! Hopefully when I go home tonight I'll be able to get things straight with Audrey!
I hang my head in shame. How bad, that as an Audrey enabler, I just sort of let her fall by the wayside. She is all swatched, but I just kept putting it off. I will take heart in knowing that she will look just as pretty next season....although, I will have to do some blog archive searching to figure out all of the tricks that everyone used to get through the pattern!