A Little More Tomten

I left you last with a description of the Tomten’s modified waist shaping, underarm gusset, and v-neck. The hood is finished now, and fits very well. I’ll describe changes in both stitch counts and percentages, since I played around with the original pattern and altered the stitch count a bit for fit, casting on 120 instead of 112 stitches.

You can see the v-neck shaping well in this photo. My original front section stitch count was 15. I reduced that, decreasing at the neck edge every other row to 6 sts., or 40% of the original count.

This brought my hood stitch count down to 42 from 60, or 70%. Increases were done as described in pattern, resulting in 56 sts. for the body of the hood. I’m finding this to be a very nice depth, taking into consideration the addition of the button band, which continues up and around the hood.

Instead of weaving the top of the hood together, I used a 3 needle bind off with the right side facing. It creates a nice, sharp edge.

Now, on to arm fit. I shortened the length of the armscye only a small bit (by 2 ridges). I’ve been using a favorite jacket as a model for my Tomten from day one, since this old jacket fits like a glove. The Tomten is a thicker fabric, so I’ve been upping the sizing a tad, but being able to follow the shaping of this jacket is great! I matched the armscye length to this jacket and away we went.

To shape the shoulders and make the sleeves angle down a bit instead of sticking straight out in a big T, I’m adding short rows to the shoulder area. At 7 ridges in, I short-rowed (wrapping but not knitting up the wraps, and it looks very nice) the center 20 sts. I then knit 2 ridges and short-rowed again. I’ll get back to you about whether this creates the proper angle. Things look promising.

On a happy final Tomten note, I think there’s enough yarn. :)


Comment Spam:

People, comment spam is going to be the death of me. I’ve been using Akismet all along, and added HashCash today. Akismet is great- it catches every bit of comment spam and puts it in a folder I can moderate. The crummy bit is that it sometimes catches legitimate comments, and at 1,000+ spam comments a day, I just can’t go through them all. It’s a shame that people take the time to comment and I never even see it. Hashcash is supposed to be able to tell the difference between bots and actual people, not allowing the bots to comment. I don’t think it’s working very well, as I just installed it a half hour ago and have 50 spam comments already. If you happen to use WordPress and know of a great spam plug-in, would you let me know? Thanks!

10 Responses to “A Little More Tomten”

  1. jess

    woo, the heavily-modified well-fitting tomten is coming along fast!

    as for comment spam: I also run wp and Bad Behavior has done a GREAT job of catching most of the spambots. I also use Akismet and I have the same problem with the false positives.

    Here’s the bad behavior link:
    http://www.homelandstupidity.us/software/bad-behavior/

  2. Veronik

    I like Peter’s custom anti spam: http://www.theblog.ca/?p=21: it’s based upon word recognition, but it’s legible (unlike some). Akismet hasn’t had very much to catch since I started to use it, and I used to get lots and lots of spam.

  3. casey

    Spam Karma 2 used to be the best. It’s been around for a while now and it’s been for a while now but it’s still an active and updated project: http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

    Jess has been running it on Frecklegirl for a year or two and it works great.

    It uses a combination of tactics and false positives are rare. Form magic to prevent spambos, maximum link count (within reason), stopwatch to count visitor’s time on a page and prevent robots, “snowballing” (regular commenters get rewarded, unknown commenters are kept on watch), stricted on posts with no recent activity.. blah blah. It’s cool.

  4. Lara

    I recommend SpamKarma 2 as well. I had a bit of a wordpress/blog emergency this week (my fault) that resulted in completely reinstalling WP and doing a huge database overhaul. Anyway, with my clean install, I got like 10 spam comments in the first 20 minutes of the blog being live. First plugin I installed and Spam Karma and since then….. nothing. :)

    It’s an easy install too. :)

    Good luck… I know the comment spam is such a hassle!

  5. Karen

    Garter stitch, how I love thee. The Tomten looks awesome! I can’t wait to see it done.

  6. Nikol

    Thanks for posting these mods. I was eyeballing this pattern the other day and trying to decide whether it would be adorable or make me look like a frump in a poorly-constructed elf costume. I can’t wait to see your shapely mods on a real human person.

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