Dress Forms and Alpaca Sweaterdom

Oh, my awesome PGM dress form (with hip!) came in a day ahead of schedule. She was a piece of cake to assemble, and she rolls so nicely. Introductions went very well. (You know when you bring in a new dress form, the old form can get territorial, but they seem to be getting along well.)


PGM: I can see SOMEone likes to eat pasta.
Dritz: You just wait, sister. When she gets finished padding you, that rear end won't be so perky.
PGM: (gasp) Well, I never!
Dritz: I can see that.


Enough, ladies! Ahem...let's move on to my sweater, shall we? Here's the neck where I picked up stitches to do the ribbing. The book said to go through the center of the cast-off stitch, but that made this ridge that I didn't like.


And I'm not happy that my decreases show up like holes. Don't know how to remedy that...


So I ripped out the 5 rows of ribbing and re-did it going below the stitch so there wouldn't be a ridge. I also tried to close up holes as I came to them. Off to the dress form. What the...?


Where's my other shoulder?


It seems that I took the ribbing all the way down the shoulder. RIP! After that, I realized that I sewed the wrong shoulder together, and I had front and back confused. I re-did the ribbing AGAIN. (It was a total of 4 times, thank you, I'm very proud.) Finally at 9:30 PM last night I got it finished.


Well, uh...hmmm. It's a sweater! And it's really warm and luxurious! But it's really big....and Dean asked me if I was wearing shoulder pads. The armholes are huge and I need to narrow the shoulders.


I stitched it together on the sewing machine, but apparently that makes this little wavy seam that may have to do with my tension or the way I lined up the fabric. On the plus side, my seams lined up perfectly at the underarm.


So I'm thinking of putting this thing under the serger (what?!) to try and take in the shoulder and side seams. Think it'll work? Amy, the Queen of knitting in my opinion, thought it was worth a try, so I'm giving it a shot. (Of course, it's supposed to be 80 degrees here today, so I'll have to wait a year to wear it.) So what have you screwed up lately? I mean sewed...