I have been a bit obsessed with knitting t-shirts this summer. My most recent project has been "Nothin' but a T Shirt", which I started getting excited about when I read about the Knitalong sponsored by Nona. There's something hokey about the idea of a Knitalong. The sponsor announces a start date, the participants comply and blog about their progress, posting copious pictures, and the sponsor publishes periodic updates. However, given how often there are crucial problems with published patterns, even those by established designers, it's useful to read about what other people have done with a patterns. And I'm an inveterate tinkerer with patterns, so I get inspired by other people's tinkering.

And so I joined the fun.


First off, the yarn I found, on sale at my LYS, was Jo Sharp Desert Garden, a cotton/microfiber blend. This is a thicker yarn than called for in the pattern, but when I knit up my gauge swatch, I really liked the way the fabric felt, so I did some tinkering and realized that even though I wanted to end up with a size 38 shirt, I could just follow the directions for the 34 as regards the number of stitches. And, of course, since I got fewer rows per inch, I had to modify the spacing of increases and decreases.

Since the yarn was on sale (googling suggests that it's been discontinued, at least in the US), I had to take what I could get. It's fairly unusual to find enough sale yarn for a sweater, especially if it's desirable yarn; that's why yarn stores put it on sale. But this particular pattern suggests using a contrasting color for the neckband and sleeve bands. And, while the LYS didn't have enough of the yarn for an entire shirt, they had almost enough in one color, and three balls in a nice, complementary color. My main color is a lavender-ish gray, and the contrasting color is a grayish lavender. So I figured I had it made in the shade.

One of the other posters in Nona's Knitalong had used the same yarn, and warned that she just barely had enough, with 9 balls of her main color (the amount I thought I'd bought), to make a size 38. Heeding the danger sign, I modified the pattern, as written, in two ways. First, I made the bottom band and facing in the contrasting color instead of the main color, since I knew I'd have enough of the contrasting color. Second, I decided to knit in the round instead of flat as much as possible. It's obvious how the first modification spares yarn. But the second one spares at least as much yarn. When you knit in the flat, you have one extra "seam" stitch on each side of each piece. But when you convert to knitting in the round, you can eliminate the seam stitches. And, as you don't have seams, you don't need matching yarn to sew them with. Another modification was to add some short rows for shaping at the bust. (By that time, I'd realized that I'd bought 10 balls of the main color, so I wasn't too worried about running out!)

I rapidly developed a passionate love-hate relationship with this yarn. I love the fabric it produces, but I hate working with it. How do I hate thee, Jo Sharp Desert Garden, let me count the ways. First, the balls are wound in such a way that it is nearly impossible to find the starting point. At least once, I resorted to rewinding, from the outside, on my yarn winder. And, for the last ball, when I wasn't using very much, I just knit from the outside, risking what would happen if the ball rolled off the sofa where I was working. Second, also due to the "put up", any mis-step in finding the yarn starting point risked producing an absolutely horrendous tangle. I learned this the hard way. There was one ball that it took me almost four hours to untangle. Of course, as is usually the case, if I'd known in advance that it would take me four hours, I wouldn't have started untangling at 11PM! Third, too many of the balls had knots in them. Seriously. Premium yarn shouldn't have knots, especially when it comes in balls containing 60 yards. There were knots in at least 4 of the balls (out of the 13 I used), and one ball had two knots. Fourth (and this is kind of the inverse of the previous problem) was the problem of joining. The yarn is cotton, so various wool-dependent tricks like Russian joins and spit-splices won't work. It's thick, so the method of knitting two or three stitches with doubled yarn—old and new—leaves an unsightly bump, as does any kind of weaving in of ends. One such bump is circled in pink in this picture:
.
(The picture also shows that the short-row shaping was successful.) And, there are ends that can't be hidden in the doubled facings or in the shoulder seams. And because the yarn is so thick, it's hard to form sturdy enough knots on the wrong side (configured so they won't poke through, of course!) that they won't untie. I still haven't dealt with that one to my satisfaction.

Well, enough problems. Now to actual pattern pitfalls. Other knitalong-ers had fretted over the number of rows between the decreases and the increases for the waist shaping. Perhaps because I had been alerted by their discussions, I didn't encounter any problem there, though it would have been kind if the interval had been given in inches as well as in rows. The second and third pitfalls concerned the neck band. The instructions had specified to neatly pick up 80 stitches around the neck opening. Well, when you're knitting at 4 stitches/inch, a certain amount of un-neatness is inevitable. But one of the knitalong-ers came to the rescue with her suggestion of doing the first pick-up row in the main color and then switching to the contrasting color. Working at the normal ratios, picking up 1 stitch for each bound off stitches and 3 stitches for each 4 rows along the edges, I ended up with 94 stitches. Oops. And, sillily enough, I knit the entire band on 94 stitches. This was a very bad idea and resulted in an unacceptably puckery neckband. So, when needs must, one must frog. It turns out that picking up 2 stitches for each 3 rows along the edge gave me 82 stitches, which I turned into 80 on the immediately following row. And, other than a bit of slop at the pick-up row, the neckband looks fine: .

In summary, I like the looks of this t-shirt, and am already planning a design of my own, in a somewhat lighter cotton blend yarn, incorporating some details from this one and some ideas suggested by other knitalong-ers.