I made a serious mistake on this sweater. I made the kind of mistake that takes a fair amount of recovery. The kind of mistake that you learn rather a lot from the making.
This is not my first experience using steeks, but it is my first time that I'm going to complete. When I first read about them, I made a few small-scale trial objects (you might call them swatches, yes) so that I could cut them up. It is also my first time using steeks to make something I wanted to have some shape to.
I wanted to have a nice round neck on the sweater. I have knit a large number of square neck sweaters and they look great (on pretty much everyone, I think). They don't look as great pulled over a round neck tee and I wear a lot of those. I especially wear those under the kind of circumstances I imagine wearing my new fair isle sweater. It's really a casual garment, so I am not imagining it going over collared shirts very often.
So, I planned what the neckline would be like, in the way I would if I were not steeking: On the first neck shaping row, I would cast off x stitches and then on a subsequent row I'd cast off y on either side and z still later and so forth. You know, usual neck-shaping stuff.
In doing this planning, I neglected the cardinal rule of steeking: There shall be only one steek start point. A steeker is going to cut some string, and the cutting needs stitches on either side of it. No floats should go from row to row. But, in my plan they did.
After all the sweat and tears, I ended up junking this much:
That is a full pitcher of frogged stitches. Many, many metres of yarn that passed beneath my fingers.
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