Battling Symmetry

Bitches, I have an announcement: Skully c'est fini! I wore her yesterday in my drafty office and I can declare her toasty. And bloody fucking heavy. That's a lot of tightly knit former sheep, that is.

A few reflections on my first wearable, nonrectilinear accomplishment: it's always going to be a Goofus and Gallant experience, isn't it?

The back of Skully has a few not-entirely-disguised mistakes from which the front is relatively free, simply because I'd already done it once:

Goofus contains five "purled when I shoulda ought've knitted" stitches. Let us never speak of it.
Gallant is comparatively flawless garter stitch on the bottom and stockinette the rest of the way up.

Goofus contains two obviously places with ineptly joined yarn that needed behind the scenes repair.
Gallant smugly points out that all of his new yarn is joined at the ENDS OF ROWS AS GOD/YHWH/ALLAH/JEHOVAH/ZEUS/CHRONOS/APOPHIS INTENDED.

And shall we even talk about the sleeves? How foolish to pop my intarsial cherry on something symmetrical. The role of Goofus is now being played by the left sleeve:

Goofus has a black hole in his brain and started doing the intarsia pattern upside down. Twice.
Gallant knows enough to just turn the fucking book upside down.

Goofus has several dire yarn breaks that unravel row upon row of hard won intarsia.
Gallant has an eye for the sturdiest of skeins and would not think of breaking.

Goofus has Avogadro's number of ends that need to be woven in.
Gallant was bold enough to do the occasionally "swing over," thus avoiding loose-end weaving from here to eternity.

But then at the end, the right sleeve wants a turn at Goofus:
Goofus snickers, knowing full well that the last skein of black yarn (which is already one more skein than the pattern called for) will run out with just the 7 rows of garter stitch to go.
Gallant knows there's another sleeve to be knit and generously leaves more than a skein of black for other sleevey purposes.

(It is unclear why the left sleeve took less than 1 skein of black and the right took about a skein and a half.)

And the seams. Oh dear. the left side seam is ultra-Goofusy, as is the left sleeve seam. The right ones came out fine comparatively, but seaming black on black bulky yarn? Never again.

All in all, though, I'm happy with it. It's not perfect, but the pattern and the yarn are pretty forgiving. Rather than being compeltely shapeless, it has kind of an A-line to it. The sleeves are monstrous all the way to the ends (there are no decreases in the pattern), but on the other hand the garter-stitch cuffs roll back nicely and the wide cuff looks kind of cute that way.

But most importantly, I finished a freaking SWEATER. You may kiss my stitch markers.