When I completed the brown handspun sweater, I managed to succeed in my goal of knitting a sweater that I absolutely want to wear (in public, even).

Now, I’ve decided that I have a new goal: I want to only have to knit the sweater once.

You might say that’s asking for a lot, and you might be right. But I’ve been known to be ambitious about these things.

When we left last Friday, the new sweater looked like this:

I was about an inch and a half short of the sleeve split, and quickly realizing that I was going to run out of yarn. I have 1500 yards, and was expecting to get a gauge of about 5 st/in, but ended up with about 6.5 because I dropped a needle size to get a firmer fabric. Still, it’s two pounds of fiber, so it seemed like that should still be plenty for the sweater (it’s the equivalent of 8-9 skeins of Cascade 220 at this gauge). Since I had no worries about the amount of yarn, I left my ribs deep and unstretched when I measured the final size, and so there was a lot of take-up in the fabric.

Add to that the fact that my stitch count always ends up a little higher than it really should be, and you have a recipe for a somewhat baggy sweater that eats yarn way faster than it should.

By the time I got to the arm split, I had used up almost half of my yarn. Clearly, I needed to pull back.

Saturday morning, I ripped the whole thing out and cast on with 20% fewer stitches. I’ll have to block those ribs harder than I’d originally planned, and the sweater will be a little huggier than before, but it fits pretty well, and better than it did before. Now, it looks like this:

I should be able to make it through the body before having used half of the yarn. I hesitate to declare success, but cross your fingers that I’ll make it through the sleeves!