Hey, you can’t say I don’t have persistence.
This little gem has literally taken me something like 5 years to finish.
To be fair, there was more than the usual amount of knitting involved. I did knit the entire thing once, and then reknit the top half; but then I got to cheating and for the third attempt I knit the main parts on a machine.
I would have thrown the thing in the trash long ago, were it not for the lovely olive green color of the Berroco "Glace" ribbon.
The saga starts with a free Berroco pattern called "New York City Lights", which I thought looked pretty cute. I wasn’t planning on using the sequins, but it was an interesting shape.
At some point I got it done, tried it on, and figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t have the boobs anymore to be going braless the right kind of bra to be going around one-shouldered.
(I’m not sure the right bra existed, actually, at the time. Well, Victoria’s Secret probably had something funky available, but I bet it would have cost more than the yarn did.)
Glace ribbon is kind of weighty and dense, which makes for very drapey fabric. Let’s just say that, along with the armhole being way too deep, and the garment having too much ease overall, the weight of the fabric itself meant that the whole garment just kind of hung and looked completely droopy – especially the parts that one usually wishes to look, ummmm, perky.
It was awful.
To fix it, I tried ripping back to the underarms and knitting a regular two-shoulder tank top. Unfortunately, that didn’t solve the problem of too much ease to begin with: it was still pretty droopy.
If you were to have read this previous post on the subject of me and green tank tops, you might remember that this was one of several that didn’t fit very well. I’d just metaphorically thrown another one in the trash (literally, though, I gave it to another knitter). At that time, in my fed-uppedness, I pulled out all my knitted tank tops, took a LOT of measurements (both me and the garments), tried everything on and noted which ones fit where — and which ones didn’t. From this data, I came up with a set of measurements for a tank top that I hoped would fit me like a second skin.
Aha, but I wasn’t confident enough to spend the time hand-knitting it. And then there was the question of whether the yarn could really stand being ripped, reclaimed and reknitted yet again. Finally, I was kind of curious to see if I could knit it on a machine, with the shaping and all. (I figured if the yarn had turned into crap, it would still work for this experiment.)
Turns out it wasn’t all that hard: I knit each piece in an afternoon. The back took longer since I was kind of figuring stuff out as I went, but the front only took a couple of hours.
It seems a lot of hand knitters are curious about machine knitting. The idea of churning out a garment in a matter of minutes usually has great appeal to the hand knitter. In the interest of furthering knitterly education, the main thing I came away with from the experiment was:
while knitting on a machine is fast, it pretty much is completely different from hand-knitting.
Machine knitting takes away most of the sensory, "ooooh this yarn feels yummy" parts, and it definitely destroys the rhythymic stitch-by-stitch zen / yoga / meditation thing. It’s a lot more like sewing than hand knitting.
Not to say that it isn’t fun to whip out a big ol’ piece of knitting in a flash, though!
Anyway — back to the tank top. Eventually, I blocked it, sewed the side seams and hand-knit the ribbings. And it fits!! Hooray! One more UFO down — something like 15 more to go.
While this was probably the oldest UFO left in my pile, this is definitely not the oldest UFO that I know of. In this category, I have to give a shout-out to my knitting student & friend, Mary, who has me beat by a long shot. She has been inspired to finally finish a lovely eggplant-purple MOHAIR vest that — kid you not — is old enough to legally drink. Yes, a 21-year-old UFO.
She brought it to the Friday morning group class, and confessed her shame newfound determination to us all. We’ve made some changes to the length and style, and it’s going to be really cute! I can’t wait to see her wearing it!
Confession is good for the soul. What’s your oldest UFO?
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