Ivy league Vest: Final Notes

She's all done!

This has been another huge learning experience for me.

Eunny Jang's Ivy League Vest is an excellent pattern and I only made a couple of modifications. More about that later.

This morning I unpinned her from the blocking board and did the second round of end-trimming.

(Yes, I really learned my lesson from that cowl.)

I also learned to make a couple of improvements on my Fair Isle technique.

I really need to tidy up those side seam floats. I seem to do okay everywhere else, but I am still making the floats a little tight in places...

...and very loose in places. 

No, those are not ends to be trimmed, but a place where I forgot to keep the float snug enough.

I also learned to pay more attention to the color pattern.

See that little center point in the middle of the picture? The one on the bottom is supposed to be like the one on top. Oops.

When it came time to pick up and knit the neck ribbing, all the pattern allowed was for decreasing one stitch on either side of the center stitch, which was waiting on a holder. It said nothing about how to do this. This being only my second Fair Isle sweater, I did not know what to do. I decided to just work a centered double decrease, because I like the look of this better than ssk before and k2tog after that center stitch. Now I realize that it would have also worked nicely had I kept that center stitch a purl in the contrast color and worked the ssk and k2tog in the main color. There are lots of other ways to do this, as well. 

What do you usually do, Fair Islers?

When it came time to bind off the neck, I thought there was a typo. The sleeve ribbing had been bound off in knit stitch, but at the neck ribbing it said to bind off in purl stitch. I went looking everywhere for errata, found none, and then decided to trust the pattern. What do you think? I think it's a small detail and would have been okay either way.

After trimming those ends on the inside, I tacked down all the steek facings with simple whip stitch. I liked the sound of doing it in blanket stitch, also suggested in the pattern, but by this time I was ready to get on with it and whip stitch is easier for me.

I did not need to do the single crochet reinforcement before cutting the steeks this time, so there was none of that to deal with. This yarn is so sticky that I had confidence that it would hold onto itself. It did!

Here's her back side.

And look at all the yarn I had left!

I only used close to half of everything except the silver and cream, which both have over half the yarn left over. I must use this for another Fair Isle project. I loved the color combo!

This is Black Water Abbey Sport and it works wonderfully for Fair Isle. It's properly rustic, washes up very nicely, and the colors are superb.

The only modifications I made to this pattern were to stop at the shoulders before the last peerie (my row gauge was different), to use the same size needle on the ribbing as on the body (I almost always do this), to change to a 16" circular and then two 16" circulars once the neck and armhole decreases brought the stitch count down too low to continue on the 24" circular (the pattern says nothing about this), to use the 24" circular on the neck edging (I do not see how anyone work that ribbing with a 16" as suggested in the pattern--there were 200 stitches on the needle before the decreases for my size), and to change the colors.

Other than that, it was a dream!