On the back panel, the initial instructions said to knit until the piece measures a certain length - easy, row gauge doesn't matter if you're just measuring the piece. But once you get into the raglan shaping, then you knit a set number of rows ... and if your row gauge is off then, you will end up with the shoulder part being too short or too long. I checked my row gauge when I was working on this part of the back panel, and it was indeed off. So I did a bunch of painful math, and determined that I needed to add about 12 rows to the section to make it the right length. I interspersed them evenly throughout the section, and thought myself very clever.
That was the last time I was working on this sweater, about a year and a half ago. When I got to the part of the front panel where I'd need to make similar row increases, I couldn't remember exactly what I did, so I thought I'd just re-measure and re-do the calculations. But when I checked my row gauge on the front panel, it was dead on.
I re-measured the back panel. The section from the raglan shaping up is almost a couple inches too long. Which means I miscalculated somewhere, and quite probably didn't even need those extra rows, or at least not all of them.
I can't face that. I don't know yet what I'm going to do. One plan is to finish this front piece, or maybe the whole thing (both fronts and both sleeves and side panels), then see just how badly it all fits together. If I'm lucky, the different won't be horrible and I can manage to fit it all together and have it still work.
If not (which is the far more likely thing), then I can only think of two other ways to fix it. I could learn a new and interesting skill. I've read about this (so obviously I'm not the only one who has ever run into this dilemma). I can (in theory) pick up a row of stitches at the base of the hood extension, then cut my yarn somewhere below that, and remove the hood extension intact, with live stitches on the bottom. Next I'd have to rip back the center back section to the point where it needs fixed, reknit it, then ... reattach it to the hood section with kitchener stitch.
Which I've never learned to do. But it can be done. Although I'm not at all sure how you would do it in the center cabled section, to keep the cables intact with no wonky break.
Plan B (C?) would be to simply figure out how many rows I'd need to add to the front panels to get them the same amount too-long as the back, and just do that. Then, although those sections would be longer than the pattern called for, at least they'd all match and, in theory, should all sew together nicely. I'm not sure, but I don't think it would majorly distort the sweater if the section from the neck to the underarm was longer than it was supposed to be (as long as it all matched). But then, I never could visualize well spatially.
Ah, but it's not that simple. I'd also have to adjust the same rows in the sleeve, and possibly the side panel insert.
Oy. This is disheartening. I wonder if I'll ever learn to knit anything that actually measures out to the right specs, and fits. I thought I was being extra careful with this one (having ruined the last 2 sweaters I attempted to make by not paying attention to gauge). But apparently I neglected to re-measure this section before moving on, assuming that my calculations were correct. How silly was that?
If I'm going to add rows to the front panel I'm working on, I need to decide that soon, because I'm well into it already.
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