Good News & Bad Khaki Tragedy

The Good:

In all this crafting excitement, I forgot to share my good news: My work permit arrived in the mail this week!! This means I am now eligible for employment in the U.S., which feels like a major relief. I was starting to get a little restless, so this is just in time. I'm also waiting on one more application that was reviewed this month (for licensure) - hopefully it will be approved as well.

The Bad:

I finally sewed buttons on the Khaki Jacket today and put it on and...well, first I'll show you the nice pictures:

Looks OK, right? It's deceiving. The fit was pretty terrible. Far too drapey, floppy all around the bottom, and saggy at the elbows. Sigh. Very disappointing. I already had a bad feeling about it after I finished the first front panel, but I soldiered through to give it a chance (there's something to be said here about Intuition). After about 15 minutes of wear, it looks like a different beast altogether. I also made several other stupid mistakes with this project. First, I forgot to make button holes, duh. Second, I cleverly decided to graft together the shoulder seams for invisibility, but when do you ever see invisible shoulders on garments? I was clearly not in my right mind. Plus, it added to the frustrating stretchiness of the whole thing.

Lessons learned:

1. Cotton can be heavy and drapey.
2. Getting gauge does not necessarily means it's going to work well with a pattern.
3. Loose gauge means saggy elbows and pulling at the buttons.
4. A structured little A-line jacket with an upright collar needs a denser wool or something to help maintain its shape.
5. Don't forget to make button holes.
6. Don't join shoulders with Kitchener stitch.

I haven't given up on this pattern yet - I'll give it another try in bulky yarn and see how it goes. After seeing the cute ones out in blog land, I still have hope!

I will probably rip it out at some point to turn it into the Hourglass Sweater - it's lovely yarn and doesn't deserve to be left as a bad sweater. 'All those hours of knitting, how can you bear unraveling it?' I've been asked. I think the answer, for me, is that having the failed object lying around feels more intolerable than seeing it converted back into a few balls of nicely wound yarn, with the potential of a fresh start. In fact, I've got a little pile of sweaters now, from when I started knitting, that are going to be recycled. I'll definitely take pictures of them so that I don't forget what my first sweaters were like - and all the amusing mistakes that went along with them.