In which I am reminded that the Gods punish hubris

I was so proud of myself. It was the quickest, most brilliant knit ever. One week from buying the yarn in London, to design, to knitting, to finished object. I was patting myself on the back and doing all kinds of triumphant, self-congratulatory dances around the living room.

I figured I was perfectly right to call myself a genius. I mean, it looked great blocking:


In fact, it looked so great that, in my self-delusion, I e-mailed Lisa at This Is Knit and offered her the pattern. (What pattern?, a little voice in my head said. I ignored it.)

After it finished blocking, I noticed little niggling things: my gauge had loosened slightly while I was knitting, and the fabric seemed to stretch and sag a bit more than my gauge swatch had. But these are small issues. Not actual problems, right?

I thread the straps through and put it on. The front looked awesome, if a little longer than I had planned:


The back is where the Gods decided to strike:


Waaaay too wide. It wasn't going to stay up for anything. While I was designing the thing, I'd failed to realize that the halter shape on the front and a flat back meant that the "hole" created for my chest wouldn't be a circle, which was what I'd planned. It would be closer to a really long ellipse. An oval. Meaning the circumference of the thing was going to be waaay larger than the circumference around my chest. At least, I think that's the problem. Well. One of the problems.

The whole thing isn't helped by the bamboo being drapey and slinky as anything. I know that's why people like bamboo. And why I loved petting the fabric. (And I have to admit, even though the damned top didn't fit, it sure as hell felt really nice and soft during wearing.) Also, even though the gauge swatch lied a bit, I really couldn't have predicted how the fabric would behave when it had the weight of a whole garment pulling it down. It totally, totally stretched. I know I could have dried the swatch with a weight and what not, but I have trouble believing that would totally reproduce the stresses of the real thing.


You can see from the picture of the side here how distorted the side "seam" has to be to get the halter to cover a decent amount of flesh at my side. And the stretching meant that the waist decreases ended up somewhere at my hipbone.

So this has been frogged while I wait for my brain to catch up with my ego.

Maybe a sacrifice to the Gods is in order. Do they still appreciate goat entrails these days?