I finally finished my teal Navelli, and it’s actually the season I could wear it!

You might remember that this top (which has been a cursed project) was a bit too short for my liking. Here it is alongside the red version of Navelli that I knit (and love):

I had knit the teal one first, in a larger size. I thought it was done and blogged about it here. For the red one, I went down a size, then discovered that I’d measured incorrectly while knitting the teal one. Here’s the post on the red one. I wasn’t really looking forward to ripping out the sleeves, neck and top of the sweater to fix it. It sat for a while, then I had an idea.

I picked out a row below the split for the sleeves at the underarm, putting the live stitches from the lower part of the sweater on one needle and the bottom loops from the live stitches on the top of the sweater on another. I knit two more inches onto the bottom of the sweater, then grafted the two pieces back together. The grafting took ages because of the number of stitches, but I kept reminding myself that I hadn’t had to reknit the top of the sweater.

Here’s the result:

In this picture, you can see the newly knitted band. I wasn’t sure whether there was a difference in colour between skeins (it’s all the same dye lot, but Koigu sometimes varies anyway) or whether it would vanish when the sweater is washed. Those stitches look crisper and more tightly twisted than the rest. It turned out to be a bit of both – the stitches relaxed so they look like the ones that had already been washed, but there is a teensy bit of colour difference due to variation within the dye lot. There are a couple of lighter zones on the back and the front, but overall, I’m happy.

This one is FINALLY done!