Girly Top: "Sew" Delightful

Do you see that?

It's actually starting to look like a real sweater!

Very exciting.

What is also exciting is how quickly I was able to seam it up.

Let's see, according to my Twitter timeline, I was able to set-in both sleeves during one marathon 3 hour session Friday night. With, apparently, breaks for playing on the computer and probably dinner.

Then I got both side and sleeve seams done in bursts on Saturday, in between gallivanting across the countryside with Hubby and going to the movies, finishing around 11 pm.

Now, maybe that doesn't sound fast to you, but I'm sure it usually takes me much longer to sew up a sweater.

I don't know if it's because it's a little, short sleeved thing or because it had full on selvedge stitches, but I think it went together a treat.

Not the Voice of Experience
It's not like I've made a million sweaters, but I'm pretty sure this is the first one I've made with a legitimate selvedge stitch.

And by that I mean not just assuming the first and last stitches will be eaten by the seam. This pattern calls for the first and last stitch to be knit on every row, making a garter stitch column up the sides.

This greatly reduced the fussing involved of squishing the edge out while trying to find the ladder to grab for the mattress stitch.

I was just able to bounce from side to side, boom, boom, boom. Because they were right there obvious.

Now I want all my sweater patterns to be like this.

On the other hand, like I said, it is a short sleeve top, so that might be helping.

No Zipper Required
Another exciting turn of events is that I'm going to be able to skip the zipper.

The pattern calls for a zipper down the left side for ease of entry, I suppose.

I saw someone on Ravelry who said she was able to get the sweater on and off without it and it gave me hope.

I figured I had nothing to loose since I was sitting there sewing it up anyway. If it worked I could move ahead. If it didn't I would be stalled. I was already plotting finding out how much the tailor at our dry cleaner would charge. Happily it didn't come to that.

After all, since the bottom section of my sweater was technically sized for a person who would take a 34 inch bust I expected to have wiggle room.

And it worked! Yippee!

After I got both sides sewn up I slithered into it, then bounced into the living room. Hubby got a gleem in his eye, which indicated it looked good. So I dashed up stairs to the full length mirror and saw it fits quite well.

Now I just have to get through the collar.

Open Wide
I was still rather concerned about how open the neck line is looking, so I took it into the store Sunday.

We looked at the picture and decided the smocking is going to both draw it in and fill it in, so I'm sure I'll be fine.

I got hardly any work done on it Sunday. I was being good and focused on weaving in the ends from the seams. But then it was time to watch TV, which is not conducive to either weaving ends or picking up neckline stitches, so I switched to my Green Step Sock.

The heel has been turned and the gusset picked up. Decreases here I come.