Hannah's Sweater-Finished!

Hi friends!
Guess what!?
I finally finished Hannah's Sweater! 

You may remember reading about this guy way back in (gasp!) February 2018. You may be thinking, "geeze, Ashley, I've never known you to to take a year and a half to finish a sweater!" and you would be right! The neck line on this sweater totally stumped me, but we'll get back to that. ​

The pattern is Illas Cies by Anne Hanson, the yarn is KnitPicks Andean Treasure in the colorway Aurora Heather. 

The pattern actually worked up very quickly, the written and charted instructions are thorough and easy to follow. I think I had most of the body pieces finished a few months after getting started (I usually work on multiple projects at the same time so this is pretty quick for me.) 

I ran into some trouble when I hit V-neck shaping and decreases. The pattern is written for many different sizes so the pattern simply instructs you to start the neck shaping/decreasing when your armholes reach the correct length. My issue here was how to decrease each side of the V neck in the lace pattern while still maintaining the lace repeats, at the same time, making sure each side was decreased identically. Whew! 

I must have overthought it because try as I might, I was not able to get those V-neck edges to match. I even thought I had it here; 

But no. As soon as I had seamed all the pieces and finished the collar I realized I had an entire extra row on the left side of the V and the whole neckline was crooked! And that, my friends, is how Hannah's Sweater ended up in hibernation for sixteen months. 

Fast forward to October 2019!

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before (hindsight is always 20/20) but I realized I could use the same technique I used while working two at a time socks to knit both decreasing sides of the V-neck simultaneously so each row would be mirrored down to the last stitch.  This was a total Ah-Ha! moment for me and def made me realize I had been too close to the problem to see what the problem really was. But I digress; I ripped out the collar and all the V-neck shaping rows, I lovingly removed stitches from all the shoulder seams, re-worked the neckline shaping, picked up the stitches for collar ribbing, re-blocked and finished Hannah's Sweater!

I'm so glad to have this guy off the needles. It was definitely less like a knitting project at the end and more like a really challenging puzzle that I had to finish to prove to myself I could do it. 

Regardless, I'm ready to see this sweater head off to his forever home and get all the love and attention it deserves. 

Thanks for reading!
I have a few more projects to share with you later in the week so stick around!

​-Ashley