the problem with finishing…

… is that you can then see what’s wrong, and you can see how much trouble it will be to fix it.  And you know if you don’t fix it, you won’t wear it.  Or you might occasionally forget what’s wrong with it and wear it, and whatever’s wrong will go wrong, usually in a way that will somehow be embarrassing. But you are too disheartened to fix it straight away.  So the finished flawed object will sit in a dark cupboard, waiting for you.  Sometimes for years.  It will give you twinges of guilt every time you open the cupboard, because you loved it more when it wasn’t finished, but you don’t love it enough to fix it right now, this minute.

This is the finished Yellow Cherry (previously).  The neckline is wonky, but I’m confident that can be fixed easily.  The armholes are too long (the bits that should be in my armpits are about 2 inches below my armpits, so when ever I lift my arms, there are great folds of fabric around my shoulders, and the buttons  pop open.  The only way to fix this is to unpick the sleeves, unravel the upper body and re-knit it to a shorter armhole, and then unravel and re-knit the sleeves.  And for now, I have no appetite to do this.  Especially as it’s now truly autumn, getting cold, and I’m not going to be able to wear the damn thing again till November.

I should say, one thing went really really right with this project – I finally worked out how to do mattress stitch (for non-knitters – this is a way of joining knitted pieces together in a smooth, almost invisible seam).  Actually, two things, I am very pleased with the colour combination of mustardy-yellow (Jo Sharp Soho Summer Cotton, in Freesia) and dirty rich purple on the buttons and ribbon.

Ravelry project link