When we last saw our hero, she was well blocked, but still awfully floppy and with a collar that just wasn’t cutting it.

When I first knit this sweater, my first ever adult human sized sweater, I didn’t actually follow the pattern. First, I knitted it in the round because I didn’t want to learn to do two-color stranded knitting in the flat. It’s a raglan sweater, which means no shoulder seams, and I steeked it. Very floppy.
I tried to compensate, I knitted the last few rows of the body on smaller needles to get a tighter gauge, thinking this might give some stability. Not really. Another mistake I made was to knit the collar right onto the body without binding off.
The buttons were all wrong. They are really pretty, but not right for this sweater. See how they flop? The button band was at too loose a gauge to support buttons with stems. I needed a flat button instead. And more buttons.
And here she is.

The collar is long enough, and shaped nicely, and has a nice new stable band. It breaks nicely, instead of just splaying. The new buttons lie flat and straight.

I bound off the collar stitches, then picked them up on both sides and knitted three rows of 1×1 ribbing. Then, using the three-needle bind off, but not actually binding off, I merged the two sides of stitches into one. Then I began the 2×2 rib that would become the collar, increasing at the edges and at the back to cause the collar to roll outwards. I made it longer than before, so that it had somewhere to go. The bound off stitches and the 1×1 rib stand gives stability to the collar.
I increased from seven to eight buttons. Which meant I needed to re-knit the button band as well. Then, taking off the old buttons left some holes in the other button band, so I re-knit that also.
All in all, I think she came out so much nicer that she’s been for the past 2 years. A new lease on life – nicely blocked and clean and ready to be added back to my wardrobe and worn with pride.

All this ripping and re-knitting started on Tuesday night. I got a good bit of the collar finished on Wednesday night at Stitch n’ Bitch and then finished up Thursday morning while my husband drove us in the carpool lane. (I get the passenger seat in the morning, when there is light, then drive home in the afternoon when I would have trouble seeing what I’m doing anyway.) When I got home Thursday night, I pulled out the buttonhole band and re-knit the buttonholes in their new positions. Then I made a mess while removing the buttons, so re-knit that side also. Thank the great maker that I had saved those balls of yarn leftover from the original project.
I finished up on Thursday night, just in time for the earth to tip the other way, starting a new season, and giving a new life to my old sweater.