Sweater Problems

There's this sweater, see. It's from one of the Yarn Girl's books, and it's called something like "Not Your Average Sweatshirt." Eldest Child asked me to knit it for her last year. I had never knit a sweater before and winter was ending, but I wanted to make my daughter happy.

The knitting of the sweater went well enough. I made a glaring mistake and figured out how to fix it and I learned how to seam a sweater. Then it was time for the hood.

The hood is what attracted the girl to the sweater in the first place. I'd never sewn on a hood before, but I'd never knit a sweater before either and that went well so I jumped in. Let me clarify: "jumping in" for me means "did preliminary research." And my internet research told me that there was an errata on their website for the hood and that many people have had trouble with getting the hood to look right. I plunged ahead anyway.

The pattern said to knit the hood until it was 20 inches long. It sounded long to me, but that wasn't mentioned in the errata, so I knit on. At long last, I reached 20 inches. I bound off and pinned the hood to the sweater.

It wasn't pretty.


I have difficulty believing it was meant to look like that. I kept thinking of Hayden Christensen peering out from under Anakin's hood:

Tell me you can't see a resemblance.


I decided I had two options. One was ripping out the entire hood and knitting it again-- not gonna happen. The other was to machine sew it up the back and cut off the excess. Before anyone tries to talk me out of the second option, let me say that some injudicious cuts have already been made, thereby making my decision for me. (Lesson learned: Don't let a frustrated knitter hold scissors.)

Does anyone out there who has ever even seen a set of knitting needles have any idea if this will work? Any helpful hints? Anyone? Bueller?