My novel suffers, my knitting soars

Procrastinating and knitting go very well together.

I finished my altered Tivoli/Picovoli Tee. More projects have been begun.



Okay, so my notes on the project...

*first off I should note that the gauge on this yarn was different than on the first so duplication with other yarns may differ.

Yarn: Lion Brand Microspun in Lavender
Pattern: Altered Tivoli Tee from MagKnits (Link on left)
Needles: US4 until the last 3inches of waist increases and then US5


I made a few changes based on how the first Tivoli/Pico attempt fit me...I cast on the same number of stitches but allotted more to the shoulder and fewer to the front and back. I didn't join and knit back and forth until the keyhole was the depth I wanted and did a garter rib for 4 rows along the edge (if I were to do it again I would have included increases in this, as it is slightly bigger than the stockinette that follows.)

The thinking on the alteration of the number of stitches for the neckline was that the last one felt too wide across the front and back and draped a bit, and I figured I would end up with the right number of stiches but a narrower width after the increases if I swapped the strap length for the panel width. I ended up doing a few more rounds of increases (until I had almost as many stitches to the front panel as in the original pattern) and it worked out alright, but I did end up with slightly wider arm hole openings (I tacked the sleeves down a bit when binding off though so it didn't change much).

When I got to the straight stitch portion after the waist decreases I did two repeats of a fir cone pattern (basically a round of YO,K1,YO,K3,SL1,K2Tog,PSSO,K3 then a round of K and then the same combo with the pattern shifted over 1/2 way ) and then quit switching between the two stich patterns to create vertical columns (which hide the increases I did better than the fir cones would have). I increased the needle size by one towards the end as well. I did garter rib for 4 rows around the bottom to match the top.

With the extra increase rounds at the top the cap sleeves were wider than on the original and came further over my shoulder. To make them fit better as a cap sleeve I left them live until I finished and then I knit across, picking up 3 stitches of the bottom of the armhole on each side and then reversed and bound off about 12 stitches of the base and then did * K2tog, K1* bind offs until I was about 12 stiches from the other end binding those off regularly.

I'm very happy with how it turned out, and only wish I had made it in a better yarn (this was just supposed to be a test run and I had the Microspun in my "this didn't work like I wanted it to" stash)