Remember that sweater I said I was making DH for Christmas?
Well I mangled some of the fussy cabling and had to frog it back several inches, so it was late getting finished.
But finished it is, and gorgeous if I do say so myself!
When I dyed the yarn, I washed it as harsh as I could. Washed and dried it on hot. Then of course both silk and wool are hot dye baths, and I did not shirk in the stirring. If it was going to felt and shrink I by gosh wanted to get as much as I could done _before_ I worked it. I knew darn well that at some point the man would just fling the finished sweater into the washer and dryer. That is part of why I used a sport weight silk (which turned out to be closer to DK) and a two ply sock weight wool. Silk shrinks so much less readily than wool, plus of course DH often gets the itchies from plain wool.
I even remembered to make it a size larger than I wanted. Just a rule when you are combining yarns to make weight. The stitches settle more with a combined yarn than they do with a single yarn. I was scrupulous about gauge. I used a pattern for 100 percent wool that said it had allowances for shrink worked in. I did everything I was supposed to to make it turn out right.
The finished sweater was 45 inches in the chest, and 20 inches from underarm to hem. I very carefully washed it by hand in woolwash and cold water. I rolled it in two towels and gently squeezed to get most of the water out. I let it air dry for half an hour, then carefully pinned it to the blocking board and set it aside upstairs to finish drying completely. Now I have the board arranged so I can hang it on the wall. Hey, I have cats and I am not completely stupid! Cats and silk? You totally have to lock one away from the other, and since the door latch to my studio is hosed, hanging stuff up is the sanest solution when you cannot shut it into a cupboard. When it is something that should be flat I prop a stick behind it so it is at the biggest angle I can manage that way. So I toddled off to sleep after a job well done, and figured I would bring it down in the morning.
Missy had other ideas. That Darned Cat not only knocked the stick out, she managed to pull the whole arrangement off the wall, hardware and all. Then satisfied with a job well done she curled up on it for her own good nights sleep. Kiri got up early and discovered the disaster in progress. Upon removing the cat from the sweater, she noted that the lovely shades of blue wool and silk were liberally coated in grey and white cat hair. Upon having visions of me in a spanky new pair of grey and white fur slippers, she panicked and rushed downstairs to wash the sweater. She washed it alone in the washer, on cold with woolwash, in a lingerie bag. She dried it by itself on tumble dry, with all three dryer balls (lose one from a pair, buy another pair, and you have three).
She met me with a cup of coffee before I got two steps out of the bedroom. Since when she got up she had rolled on my hair and darn near squashed me into the mattress with no more than a grumbled, "you should braid your hair before bed" (thus inspiring me to roll over and grab another hour while she turned into a human), I figured something was up.
Yep, something was up alright. The sweater I had fussed over for three months and blocked so carefully now just about fits Ash. Except as is often the case when the front is heavily patterned and the back is not, the back shrank more than the front. So it fits him as long as you don't turn him around and see that the back stops about an inch short of his waist.
I think I will wash it again and hang it on a hanger while it is wet. That should stretch it some. If I wrap a plastic hanger in a towel it should keep the shoulders mostly in shape as well.
I'll see if I can get DH to snap a pic of it first...
NightMist