i wasn't built for this

My mom and I did our own knit-along (KAL) this year. I barely mentioned it here because we both had lots of problems with the pattern. There were fits and starts and start-overs, much frogging and exasperation due to ambiguities in the pattern. She finally finished hers a little bit ago and send me a picture. I picked mine up and put it down again many times, finally blocked the front and back pieces last week, and today took my first selfie of the work-in-progress:

The neckline is approximately below the boobage.

This actually looks worse than it is. The sweater, in case you're wondering, is the aptly, though not elegantly, named Scoop-Neck Pullover from the Spring/Summer 2014 edition of Vogue Knitting.

I believe the editors are working pretty hard on conserving space on pattern instructions, because this one was not for the faint of heart. My mom and I are both pretty dang experienced knitters, and we were both perplexed more than once in the process of making this thing together. She'd call me in consternation over the mesh pattern (the part inelegantly draped over my mid-section in the above picture), and I would throw my rat's nest of moss-colored yarn down in frustration every few days to knit something else like ribbed socks.

I mean to document more of our process here, but it was all so frustrating that I didn't bother. Hers is done, though she claims it's too big and she needs to redo it. Mine is in the state you see above - blocked but not assembled, and the neckline is obviously huge.

Seriously. Maybe if my boobs sagged just a little more that would look okay, but it's like the sweater was designed for someone with, well, a much different figure than the one I've got. My mom actually had the same issue, even though she is, ahem, differently endowed than I am, and she tells me the neck improves quite a bit when you pick up the stitches for the finishing work. I sure hope she's right.

Meantime, I spent a little time this afternoon attaching the sleeves and ignoring the excruciating complaints of my children, who had stretched a 10-minute toy pick-up into more than an hour of whining and rolling around on the floor instead of freaking putting the wooden marble set into its box for pete's sake so we could go to the park.

Then we went to the park and they complained they were bored.

School starts September 3. I'll say no more about that.

Anyway, back to the sweater. It looks so nice in the magazine, and the yarn my mom and I are using (yes, we're using the same yarn and in the same color, even!) is just wonderful - Knit One, Crochet Too Cozette in the color "Moss." If I ever get this thing done and looking decent on me, I expect I'll wear it a lot.