The Tangled Arts

I wanted to show you a finished Imogen (ravelry link) today. I really did.

However, since I cast off, I have been struggling with a rolling edge on the bottom part of the sweater that neither a good steam or soak blocking will fix.

Really Big Roll

See, because the back of the sweater is really just a big rectangle, and is knit in plain stockinette, it has a natural tendency to curl or roll.You can see in the really precise schematic that I drew that the arrow is pointing to the cast on edge. The sweater is really just one big rectangle and the bottom of the rectangle is currently rolling up to my eyeballs.

Imogen Schematic

This is great if you like that sort of thing, but because of how the sweater is constructed, it is rolling to the outside of the sweater and the end result is that the sweater is now about 2″ too short (concidentally, the exact length of the roll).

This wouldn’t be such a problem if:

a) the roll weren’t only in the back of the sweater (the front of the sweater is fine,since you pick-up stitches all the way around the front to form the shawl or cowl type collar)

b) as a result of the roll, the sweater now hits me at perhaps the most unflattering place on my whole body – directly across the widest part of my hips and butt. No, there are no pictures; don’t even ask.

c) The roll didn’t cause the sweater to bunch up in the back, which is seriously unflattering and not very comfortable.

However, given those three things, the sweater clearly can not be worn as is and needs some help.

I briefly toyed around with the idea of doing a crochet chain on the inside of the offending roll which in theory would smooth the whole thing out, but decided against this as the edge of the sweater would still look a little un-finished.

Then, I realized that I could polish it up by adding an i-cord edging.

So, in order to do this, I picked up stitches all the way across the bottom edge of the sweater and then began an i-cord bind off.There is a great tutorial here which I used to get me started.

Picking up about a zillion stitches

However, since it took me all of about an hour to get the stitches on the needle in order to get started with the edging (the children wanted supper and TG wanted to talk about stuff), the actual edging will have to wait until next post.

In case you need more stuff to look at, in a fit of start-itis, I cast on two new projects in the last two days.

Foliage Scarf

Bunny's New Socks