The saga of the Petrie shell from Knitty is finally over. In case you weren't following, this was a
project I started at the end of April as something summery I could finish fairly quickly. Well, it clearly wasn't! Maybe it was the many distractions (conference in Italy, wedding in Greece), maybe it was the endless stockinette... Regardless, this felt like it was never going to be finished.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as they say, and there are many many things I would have changed in this pattern - no offence to the pattern designer, but for me several things were plain unnecessary. To be honest I only have myself to blame, if I had read it properly and in full before starting I would have been able to make the changes anyway. So here goes. This is definitely something that can be knitted in the round. I would have just knitted it in the round until the armhole, at which point I would have separated the front and the back and the re-joined at the top with the three-needle bind-off, as written in the pattern. No boring purling and no counting rows to make sure that I have knitted exactly the same on each side (the pattern only specifies inches in length, not rows). And no messy sewing - it took me forever to stitch the two sides together with a kitchener stitch, which I concluded is the only way to do it if you don't want an ugly seam on each side. Oh, and much much fewer ends to weave in, another thing I find absolutely boring.
On the same note, I would not have done the hem, at least not the bottom one. I can see why she designed it that way, but as you may have concluded, I do not like sewing. I sewed both top and bottom hems with the yarn at first, but then when I put the top on the top one was curling down too much and showing the stitching on the inside, so I had to re-do it with some thread to even it out a bit more.
I thought I might add a note here about the wonders of blocking. See the photo below, you will notice how much the stitching is raised in the middle - I was actually quite worried that this unevenness would not go away, but thankfully it did. I actually soaked the top in some water with
eucalan (which does not need rinsing), scrunched the water out by rolling in a towel and laid it flat for a couple of days until it dried.
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| Before |
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| After |
There are still two issues with this top, however. The neck sits quit funny (see photo below) - perhaps I should have blocked it in a different way, but I just can't make it less floppy at the moment. The second is that, as soon as I wore it the bit near my waist creased in a weird way that looks like I have a roll of fat underneath (I swear, I don't!) So perhaps I need to re-block it to sort these issues out. Or just learn to live with them. At least it is not transparent, as I had feared, so can definitely be worn on it own.
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| Not as good a photo as the previous one. But at least it's finally summer in London! |
