Cabled Jacket of Doom… VANQUISHED
Okay, I’ve officially been working on this project for six months now. First I had to contend with the problem of multiple errors in the pattern. (Suck it, Debbie Bliss.) Then the cat decided she liked the taste of Noro. At the end of July I realized I was running short on wool and decided to frog the whole body back and reknit it a smaller size. (Major kudos to Calico & Ivy for having more of my dyelot, and to Don at Prestige for helping me track it down.) In August I declared that this jacket was “my Everest,” and that I’d “finish it or perish in the attempt.” I hadn’t even gotten to the frackin’ sleeves yet. The steeking was relatively pain-free, thank God, and I started the collar without too much trouble. In September I started the sleeves and decided to turn the collar into a hood. I was just a few steps away from finishing it… and as Indiana Jones says, “That’s usually when the ground falls out from underneath your feet.” Unthinkingly, I knit my sleeves according to the pattern, and when I went to sew them in they wouldn’t fit. (It’s all because stupid Debbie Bliss assumes you get her row gauge, and I so didn’t.) So the jacket went on a shelf for three months while I brooded over this final obstacle. On Friday night, I pulled it down and started frogging back the sleeves. People, I knit those sleeve tops FIVE TIMES over the past three days. Not only was I working without a pattern, but I was also contending with my own freakishly broad shoulders. But last night – FINALLY – I got it. I GOT IT. I needed to keep the momentum going. Back to the collar-turned-hood. Yeah, I had to frog that back once to re-work the shaping. Again, I was basically inventing here, though I did get ideas from both Rogue and Janda. I used a three-needle cast-off to join the hood seam this afternoon. Check it out. I’m still not happy with the excess material at the back of the neck (which I think is a remnant from the original standup collar design) but I’m not going to redo it. How often do people wear their hoods up anyway? It looks great down, so it’s staying. Now I just need to steek the front, sew in a zipper, and maybe do an I-cord border around the whole front edge.

But the important thing is – I WIN! This jacket threw everything it had at me, and I defeated the sucker! This sweet sense of victory almost makes up for the fact that I spent the entire Christmas holiday sitting on my couch, giving myself premature arthritis.