Victory!

I finally finished my Knit for Victory cape and I’m really happy with it.

I actually finished it before Christmas and I was miserable about it. Unblocked it looked horrible and I wasn’t convinced that blocking would help.

I decided to block this by hand washing and then spinning out all of the water in the spin cycle of the washing machine. Then I draped it over my dressmaker’s dummy with a towel underneath. I was hoping that letting it dry this way would help it kind of drop into shape.

It worked! Yay! I wouldn’t recommend blocking this way for anything other than a cape, but once blocked, I was in love with it.

So I took myself off to Buttonmania to get the perfect button. As usual, the perfect button was sitting there waiting for me.

As you can see below, the button is just a great match. It’s got a bit of a 60s shape to it – but unfortunately, the placement of the buttonhole is just damn weird. I know that you’re meant to turn down the corners of the neck edging to make a little winged sort of collar – but it just looked weird. Also, the buttonhole was stretched by the weight of the garment.

I hated the cape again.

 

So I put it in the box of unfinished items and felt sad. It was almost great – but that button position was never going to make me happy.

I decided to rip out the neck edging and the buttonhole band and re-knit them with the buttonhole higher up – where the neck band meets the buttonhole band. Unfortunately, after already officially “finishing” this garment, I had no enthusiasm for the task at all.

Today I finally got around to the ripping and re-knitting, and as I pulled off the offending bands I decided not to place the buttonhole higher. I decided to leave it out completely and extend the neckband into ties.

A bit hard to see, but MUCH better. I cast on 60 stitches on either side of the neckband to make the ties.

Apart from adding ties and removing the button, the only other change I made was to knit the main section on 4.5mm needles instead of 5.0mm needles. I just liked the fabric better on the smaller needles.

If I were to knit it again, I’d add a two stitch selvage to both sides of main pieces. It would make sewing up much easier. As it was, seaming was a huge pain and I’m not 100% happy with the seams. I actually like sewing up garments, so when I say that seaming was a pain in the arse, its coming from a fan of seaming.

So here are a few pictures of the finished cape. My head is cropped out of most of the pictures because I’m recovering from a foul cold at the moment and my head kind of looks like a giant strawberry chuppa-chupp right now.