Here it is, the sweater I have been toiling over.

But I think all the hard work has been worth it, no?

Ok, I am about to get all Wordy McWord on you.

Yarn: Jaeger Trinity (40% silk, 35% cotton, 25% polyamide fibre). I don't know how many balls I used, except that one ball got absolutely decimated when I had to rip out one of the many times I ripped. This yarn sticks to itself pretty well. Upon any sort of ripping or tinking, the yarn became very worn and fuzzy. And forget spit splicing. I had TONS of ends to weave in, which was not so much the fun. Also, for a yarn with no animal fiber, there was a lot of vegetable matter in this. Like, see that tree behind me in the picture? That tree saw this sweater and was all like, "I think I see my cousin in there."

The resulting fabric, after a full wet block, is soft without losing "body" and my gauge did not budge. I would use this yarn again, despite challenges during use.

Needles/Gauge: Susan Bates, size 3. The ball band for this yarn specified size 6 needles for a gauge of 22 stitches to 4 inches. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Now, I am a tight knitter, and I needed size 3 needles to get a gauge of 24 stitches to 4 inches. YMMV, of course.

Pattern: Heavily modified Elizabeth Zimmerman Seamless Saddle Shoulder. I used the "recipe" found in Knitting Without Tears. If you do not own this book, RUN to the bookstore and buy it right now.

I say "heavily modified" because the original recipe does not include any real waist shaping or arm shaping. Also, Zimmerman gives rather specific numbers and math to follow. As I knew that I would be making this sweater to follow my contours very closely, I didn't pay much mind to these numbers. I cast on what would fit around the starting points (waist and wrists) and decreased and increased as I went along. This is why this sweater took me two months and a lot of ripping out to knit.

A lot of details were fudged due to the carefree lack of planning I did in regards to the starting numbers. Most of it worked out, but if you look at the lines for the should shaping, you can see that they are way far apart. In the book, Zimmerman states that shoulder width is, on average, 14". I had, and still have no idea how to measure for shoulder width, (do you go to the shoulder knobs? The armpits? WTF?) so I went with that number. I think it's too far. Oh well.

Another modification was the inclusion of short row shaping for the bust. Every sweater I have knit up to now has not had short row shaping for this area. Every sweater up to now has been a failure, riding up in the back, stretching out in the front. In desperation, I picked up a copy of Big Girl Knits and read their awesome chapter on shaping and used it on this sweater. Even for math impaired me, the shaping section was laid out and broken down so simply that I could figure it out and apply it with ease. So you can be big in just one area and still benefit enormously from this book.

OK, one more picture.

That's me, all, "La, I am so tired of modeling." Also, I wanted to show how much the back of the sweater was NOT riding up or flaring out. ROCK!