Sweater, now with 50% more misfortune

My vacation, I thought, would be the perfect time to correct the mistakes of the Sweater with Rib Pattern. So last week I prepared to measure, take notes, calculate and set my course toward a successful sweater. The first thing I did was to lay out my sweater on the dining room table to take it apart and get a good look at what needs to be done.

Right away I noticed something that had escaped my attention earlier: the front and back of the sweater aren't quite the same color.

As you can imagine, I was not happy to see this. I'm using Caron Simply Soft which is cheap, acrylic, and declares "no dye lot," which apparently doesn't mean what I thought it meant. I assumed it meant "no need for a dye lot because the materials are all fake and completely uniform." But no, it seems to mean "Hey buddy, you're on your own. Good luck with that." For some reason, this color issue is only visible under the dining room light, which is why I hadn't noticed it before. (And is inexplicable - it's a crappy old chandelier with those stupid little chandelier bulbs.) I didn't even attempt to capture the issue in a photo. The long and short of it is that if it's so apparent in one room of my house, it's sure to be apparent somewhere I will go wearing the sweater, so it must be fixed.

I assembled all the skeins of the yarn together and divided them up based on the color differences. There is enough of one shade to at least do another front (or back - they are the same). Worst-case scenario, the sleeves will end up being slightly off color. But there is no avoiding having to do another whole large piece, and this is in addition to ripping back and correcting the lace pattern.

One thing I try to do every time I have vacation in the winter is watch Pride & Prejudice, the 5-hour BBC version. While doing so I ripped back and re-knit most of one piece with the lace coming out higher up. A little too high. So I ripped back again (this is becoming a theme) and finally finished that piece. Third time's a charm, as they say.


Now I just need to make another whole piece like this. Again. Let's hope I get to wear this sweater while it's still cold enough to do so.