FO: Flaming Snail

Before I get to WIPing today, I wanted to document a more recent FO.

Pattern: Abalone (Ravel it)

Needles: US size 7

Yarn: Sundara Fingering Silky Merino -Flaming Flamingo

This was a fast and easy knit once I got going. I had some issues getting started, namely gauge swatch issues. I'm not sure I want to add to my history of wanking about all the reasons swatching never works out for me. Because of these issues, I ended up with some unintentional edits to the pattern.

I decided to use a fingering weight yarn held double instead of a worsted weight one. I've had this Sundara sitting around caked for forever now, more then 6 months. (Thinking about it, it's been caked for about 10 months....) I originally started a Coraline with it and hated having to try and alternate rows while working on that pattern; I knit too tightly for it to work out, especially when the first three stitches of every row had to be slipped.

Anywho.

I made my swatch, got my "gauge" of 5.5-ish SPI, did the math, and cast on. As I was knitting, I realized that my stockinette looked looser then what my gauge was supposed to be, so I checked it and sure enough, it was about 4.75 SPI. UGH. Instead of ripping out and restarting, I redid my math and found my new 100% number to increase to. As a result, my Abalone is a bit more shallow in the back and isn't as narrow at the bottom as the pattern was originally written to be.

There isn't too much else to say about it, really. I made the sweater a bit shorter then I've seen most of them made, because I didn't want it to hit very low on my hips or butt. The pattern is really well written so that you can duplicate the results in the size that you need. I love patterns that are only a page long.