Anna and I really did finish knitting our Tag Team Sweater Project sweaters — what seems like ages ago — but it took us until we were together in Indianapolis to finally take some finished photos. So a project that started in such a frenzy has come to a rather languid conclusion.
Once again, we found ourselves posing for photos at the end of two very long and tiring days, not exactly looking our freshest. But Bristol Ivy generously and patiently manned the iPhone for us and snapped these photos as we goofed around awkwardly outside the state capitol building (I think?) before collapsing into some chairs in the Hyatt lounge for the evening. Thanks again, Bristol!
I know everyone has been wondering since we first announced this project whether Anna was getting the short end of the stick. As you’ll recall, the arrangement was that I would knit all four sleeves; Anna would knit the two bodies; and then we’d swap parts, join our respective sleeves to bodies, and knit our own yokes. (Through no one’s fault but my own, I wound up knitting five and a half sleeves but let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.) Out of my own curiosity, though, I gathered a little data along the way:
Anna’s Lila was knitted in Swans Island Pure Blends, a worsted-spun alpaca blend (71 yards/oz), while my Trillium is in Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, a loftier woolen-spun wool (79 yards/oz). So even though her sweater is smaller than mine (a smaller size and a more abbreviated shape, plus a looser gauge), the two sweaters wound up being almost identical in finished weight: Lila is 13.6 oz and Trillium is 13.7 oz. I find that poetic. Lila’s sleeves weighed 4.75 oz, so I knitted 338 yards or 34% of Anna’s sweater. Trillium’s body weighed 5.85 oz, so she knitted 462 yards or 43% of mine. So yes, in that sense, she got the short end of the stick.
That said, the idea was never to knit equivalent parts of each other’s sweaters — it was to save each other from bogging down in the parts we each find tedious. And we succeeded! But the thing is, had I followed my own best practices and studied the schematic before we began, I most likely would have decided to make this sweater a couple of inches shorter than it is, which would have meant less knitting for Anna — to the point that it might have been a fairly even trade after all. <insert pained-face emoji> Sorry, Anna!
All that really matters (hopefully!) is this: We had fun; we cemented a beautiful friendship; and we ended up with two great sweaters. Win/win!
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For the complete backstory, see my collected Tag Team posts, Anna’s blog, and/or the #tagteamsweaterproject hashtag in Instagram. Thanks for all the cheering as we knitted our way through!