St Brigid: FO

October 28, 2007February 13, 2014 jody

alternatively entitled, the post that took 3 years to write

It’s finally done, and I find myself at a loss for words. I’ve been done for a full week now, and I still can’t quite believe that it’s true.
I knit St. Brigid
There were many false starts (including one I never documented). I’m not quite sure why this time did the trick. The color? Maybe. The deadline? Maybe. The encouraging comments? Most definitely.
I have so many people to thank, and I’m positive I’m going to forget some of them. Thanks to Katy for hosting the KAL, Vicki for finishing hers almost 3 years ago and being an awesome cheerleader for my own, Marnie for encouraging me to consider retaining the saddle shoulder, Christy for knowing the right amount of good-natured ribbing to keep me on course (because she knows how fickle I can be!), Jessica and Kristy for enduring our Thursday night get togethers with endless whining about my boredom, EZ because without her I may not have had the courage to consider modifying this sweater as much as I did, and to Maggie Righetti because her chapter on sleeve shapes kicks ass.
I knit this sweater in under 10 weeks, and I don’t recommend it. My hands hurt. I was bored. I was hyper-focused every weekend and I was up until 2am the Sunday of Rhinebeck just so I could wear it in 75° heat. In my ideal world I would have taken a break after the body was done, but maybe in my ideal world I never would have finished at all.
specs
pattern St. Brigid by Alice Starmore from Aran Knitting
yarn Cascade 220 Aporto. 9.5 skeins
needles Knit Picks options size 6
mods tons, read my archive for a full list
sleeves and hood
The sleeves came out rather nicely and pretty much as planned (thankyouverymuch Maggie Righetti). There’s a lot to share on the sleeves so I’ll write that up as a separate post. The quick scoop is that I changed them to a set-in style (but retained the saddles) and knit them 2 at a time because I was afraid I wouldn’t take good enough notes to knit them individually.
The hood worked out pretty well too. I knit 4 repeats of the chart up each side and then grafted the 2 sides together (they’re mirror images of each other so they grafted together perfectly). My grafting is a bit tight in a couple places so I may go back and loosen that up a tad.
thoughts on the sweater
I never expected this to be a shapely sweater. Having said that, it’s still a bit more bulk-adding than I expected. I probably could have gone down an inch or two more in the body and still have been OK, but I wasn’t sure because bulkier sweaters need more circumference to fit right.
I love wearing it and love the fact that I finally made it. I’ve hit a milestone in my knitting that I thought I might never hit, and in doing so I’ve learned a few new things about why I knit and what it means to me. It’s going to take some time to gather my thoughts, so I’ll leave that to my next post.
For now, will you excuse me while I pop around town in my new sweater!