Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

I finished my Coral Seas Top and have mixed feelings about this one. First of all, it was very hard to find a ribbon for it. In retrospect, I *should* have found a ribbon before I started knitting! Anyway, I tried to find a matching color, but the ones I found were either too pink or too orange for it. So I ended up with a very yellowy beige color. This is me nudging myself out of my comfort zone a bit as far as mixing colors go (yeah, I'm pretty conservative). Sometimes I like it just fine. Other times, I feel like an Easter egg!

The other thing about this top is that it is hard to keep the ribbons in place. After you wear it for awhile (especially if you're sitting a lot), they tend shift around and bunch up in certain areas. I guess I *could* go back and tack the ribbon down in more places.

And finally, the top is a bit big for me. At the armhole shaping, my instinct was to make more decreases, but I figured that that would give it the same shaping as just about all my tanks, so I decided to go with the pattern. If I had it to do over, I *would* have gone with my instincts. I had to bind off very tightly at the top to keep both the front and the back from gaping out. The other change I would have made would have been to change needle sizes between the bottom ribbing section and the top part more gradually. The pattern calls for you to jump from a size 4 to a size 7. Even though that comes with some stitch decreases, if you look above the ribbed section, you'll see the tank bulges in places where I don't really bulge.


So all in all, it's a really nice pattern and looks super-flattering on the designer. But on me, it would need more tweeking to work. Oh well. They can't all be winners! :-) If you want more details, they are in the gallery.