So my family and I moved two weekends ago, but I managed to knit a swatch, and cast on and get started. Alas, no reliable DSL at home yet or I could show pictures of the following tale of woe.
The pattern only goes up to a 46 inch bust, and since I'm a 47 I was ready to add a few stiches here and there, make the ralagan seam a little longer, etc. to compensate. So my swatch measures out way too tight on 7's, go up to 8's and it's pretty good with the brown. Right on, I say. I cast on and start knitting away. I noticed that my ralagan shaping was looking pretty darn tight and wasn't measuring up the way it should have. I pull out my trusty measuring tape and whadda ya know, my gauge is way off, like 25 stitches over 4 inches instead of 19. Woah. So that sucker was frogged like nobodies business. Went up to 9 needles and the gauge was still off 21.5 stitches with the green. But I can't go up any higher unless I want a lacy sweater.... So I redid the math, cast on and started over. I finally started the torso last night and felt pretty vindicated. I'm thinking either my yarn is funky, the pattern's gauge is funky or there's a little yarn gnome magically making my yarn do funky things, either way there's some supreme funkiness going on here. I had originally wanted to make the long sleeve version, but with all the changes I had to do I think I'm going to run out of yarn. I guess I could order more and pray that it'll look right.
Thankfully I'm used to having to tweak patterns to fit my chest or I would have pulled my hair out.
