Amaryllis, all done

Ooph...  It took me a while to knit and even longer to photograph and present, but my aran Amaryllis pullover is finally, gloriously finished.  I confess to feeling some relief here, I was bored out of my wits with this longish knit, even though the design itself is anything but boring. 

I find most traditional aran sweaters, with their boxy shape and crew- or turtlenecks, rather unflattering (unless you are a stick figure of a person, which I am not).  Therefore, I reached for the big guns and went for rather drastic waist shaping.  If you don't have much of a waist, you need clothes that create an illusion of one!  Additionally, Amaryllis has enough positive ease in all the areas that shouldn't really be highlighted (belly, in my case), while keeping an overall 'fitted' appearance. 

To tell you the truth, I am very, very happy with how it turned out (and that it's finally done...).  The armholes are slightly bigger than I would want them to be but I don't think that's a problem.  The sweater is super warm, wonderfully comfortable and since its premiere, I wore it for an embarrassingly long time before finally throwing it into a washing machine.  Oh yes, it's made of acrylic/superwash wool blend so I can machine wash it as much as I please. 

Much of Amaryllis was improvised on the go and I tried a few techniques that were new for me, e.g. saddle shoulder and short row sleeves knitted up the armholes once the front and back were joined.  Getting the whole thing right was a bit tricky, but tell me, wasn't it worth the effort?

The pullover was worked in the round up until the armscye, then divided into front and back and worked flat, leaving stitches in the last row live.  These I used to 'anchor' the cable that joins front and back.  Once all live stitches were used up, I knit up a round along the armhole, shaped the sleeve cap with short rows and worked in the round decreasing in more or less regular manner until the sleeve reached desired length. 

Knitting arans in the round is universally considered a bad idea, but I took my chances.  I used around 650g of aran weight yarn, so I hope the pullover is light enough to hold its shape without any additional structural strengthening.  If, however, I notice any stretching, I'm going to implement plan B: reinforcing crochet chains on the wrong side in all the crucial areas.  Hopefully I won't need to, because I really want to focus on other projects now. 

Socks coming up next!