Knitting Challenges
Now that the Olympic flame has gone out, it's time to retire my collection of Knitting Olympics buttons from my sidebar. For a non-participant, I certainly gathered enough buttons, and I definitely had fun watching others take part. If I had known about Team Finish the Damn Thing! or the alternate UFOlympics, I might have joined one of them with my Nothin' But a Shapely Tee. Perhaps I'd now be wearing it with pride and going to collect a gold medal (which, incidentally, I think is much better looking than the medals they were handing out in Torino). However, it's probably just as well I didn't because I really prefer my knitting challenges to be unrelated to deadlines. I do admire all of you who did take up the Knitter's Olympian challenge though!
Speaking of my project which goes on and on, I finally overcame the problem I had with my neckband today. I didn't bother with a picture since it looks much as it did in the previous entry, only with the neckband lying flatter. In order to insure my success this time, I came up with an approach which would keep me from knitting a neckband that was still too loose. First, I ran a piece of waste yarn through the stitches of the purl round where the neckband is folded. Then I unraveled back to that round and tried it on. I grabbed the ends of the yarn which was threaded through the last round and gathered in the neckband until it was small enough to lie nicely against my neck. Then since I couldn't tie the yarn around my neck and still get the top off, I took a pen and carefully marked the waste yarn where each end came out of the gathered stitches. Next, I inserted my needle back into the round at the base of the neckband. I pulled out the waste yarn and measured the length between the marks I had made. I multiplied that measurement by my stitch gauge to figure out how many stitches the neckband would need to be decreased. Since this turned out to be quite a large number, I decided to include two decrease rounds. After ripping back to my needle, I worked half the decreases spaced evenly in the second round of the neckband and the other half in the round before the turning ridge. For the second part of the neckband (that which gets folded to the inside), I made the same number of increases -- working half of them in the second round after the purl round and the other half in the very last round. Once I grafted that last round in place, I tried on the T-shirt again and confirmed that everything had turned out to my liking. Finally, I will be able to move on to the sleeves!