I am knitting a beautiful sweater for my mom. She is undoubtedly knitworthy - she taught me to knit when I was a child and is the first one I turn to when I need someone to watch my kids. I saw a pattern on Ravelry and it screamed 'MOM!' at me as soon as I saw it. I got yarn that would work in a color that she liked and knit on. It goes quickly, I finish the body - yay! I am ready to move on to the collar and find this direction: Sew shoulder seams.
It seems like such an innocent sentence, doesn't it? Simple, to the point, can't be that hard. Seriously, the shoulders are each 9 sts wide, so there is minimal area to screw up in, right? Wrong. I sewed the darn shoulder seams somewhere around 10 times and was very unhappy with how not neat and tidy it looked. If it had been an underarm seam, I may have just let it go and moved on, but the shoulder is pretty visible and my failure would stare me in the face anytime I saw this sweater, so I was determined to
What to do if the 10 ways you tried look crappy? Call in the big guns - like a friend who owns a yarn shop and knows a lot about seaming. I get the tip to keep the pieces laying flat instead of trying to do it with right sides together in sewing. I get a diagram and it seems like it will work - yay! Until I try it. it looked like this:
Seriously, this was the best one. I was underwhelmed too. So, off I go to my lys for backup. It starts off well, but then that bumpy part on the right comes out again. Apparently it was not caused by my ineptitude (by itself anyway, I totally admit that I may never have seamed shoulders before - I can't remember). So, it looks like the stairstep bind off is the culprit, and I leave feeling slightly vindicated.
Plan: undo the last stairstep that is 2 rows higher than the others and retry.
Execution: not great. I can't make it look good after the first few stitches. Apparently I do not play nicely with stairstep bind offs.
New plan: Rip back all the stairsteps and short row those babies. That way, I will have a smooth row to seam.
Execution: 2 sets of short rows added to each shoulder section. Brilliant idea hits - ditch the seaming and use a three needle bind off instead. Brilliant idea actually pays off and the shoulder looks like this now:
Ignore the little hole on the top half, that is gone now that I wove in my ends from adding more yarn. Short rows used more yarn than the original bind off. Totally worth it. I may not have used seaming, but I totally was the boss of these shoulders.
