I leapt into this challenge feet first and had been happily knitting along on my sweater making great progress. I had knit about 12" of the back and was ready to start the armhole shaping. I was acting rather smug about it too, flashing it to Marsha, showing off how much I had knit, until I reread Marsha's blog post about our Knit Off yesterday.
Heather has her sweater well under way. She has altered her pattern and the changes over the pattern may slow her down. That girl wants to win.
I did make a change to my pattern, I cut four inches out of it. The pattern book said the smallest size would be 40" around when finished. I wanted a less bulky, more form-fitting sweater and I worked out that if I removed one pattern repeat it would decrease the size by 4" making the sweater 36, my size.
Had I used my BRAIN when calculating this major pattern alteration, I may have realized that by removing one pattern repeat removed 4" from one half of the sweater. It would have required me to also remove 4" from the other half of the sweater, thus making my pattern 8" smaller and a size 32. This alteration would have most definitely been form-fitting but it would not have been attractive.
I started over.
