janestarz | A poor start to the Pumkin Ale

Welcome to autumn and a new knitting project. Lots of poorly lit evening photo's and long ramblings to make stuff work for my body.
I suspect my friends are tired of hearing me sigh about how nothing fits my body...but nothing fits my body because I'm so much taller than the average woman. Even in the Netherlands, a country with notoriously tall people. Not all patterns account for taller or shorter people, and it gets somewhat tiresome to ALWAYS run into problems when making something for yourself.

One of two new projects on the needles is the Pumpkin Ale cardigan. Swatching went swimmingly and now that I'm 30+ rows in, I realise that I'm not getting where I wanted to be.

This cardigan starts with a beautiful cabled back panel, and then the fronts are picked up and knit sideways. I had calculated with the help of a swatch how in stockinette the back panel would be 50 centimeters wide at the bottom, wide enough to cover a flattering portion of the butt. Too narrow, and it would emphasize it in the wrong way, but with 50 centimeters I would amply cover the butt from, shall we say, "butt-dimple to butt-dimple" and be fine.
Except that these are all cables and cables scrunch up and I ended up with a back panel of only 40 centimeters wide at the bottom.

For a while I pondered if I could just ignore it, just knit the cardigan to pattern, and just forget about adjusting every little thing about a pattern for once. But the memory of a sew-along was still very fresh in my mind. If I don't adjust the pattern, I will just be horrified and disappointed. It will be much better to put in the work, rewrite the damn pattern to fit me and make something that looks good.

But where to start? I calculated the other sizes, to see if they would fit my hips better. (I'm a piramid, a pear-shape, so a larger size hip than shoulder). The problem would be to get from one size to another. With the intricate cables and the quite well calculated space between the cables, there really isn't a good way to fudge it. It has to be mathematical or I'll end up with wonky, off-center cables. Nodbody wants that to happen.

Instead, I started looking at the pattern: How was the back panel built up? Where and when are the decreases, can I figure out where the waistline is happening?
After calculating the intended distance according to the pattern's gauge, I came up with the following:
After the cast-on edge, you knit in pattern for roughly 8 centimeters before working the first decreases. Then onwards again, for another 8 centimeters, for a second set of decreases. And then it's 8 centimeter straight ahead until we meet the first increases.
That gave me a clue of where the waistline would sit and how long the cardigan would be: some 16 to 20 centimeters under the waist.

It also helps determine how much longer I would want to make this. I don't yet know if cables scrunch up vertically as well as horizontally, but I know the result of all those cables isn't very flexible, so it's not likely to sag very much. I very much fear the 16 centimeters is a generous estimate.

I know from my own measurements and drafting (sewing) patterns that my waist to hip length is 26 centimeters, so that is roughly what I should aim for. Allowing for scrunching, I could just double the amount of decrease rows before reaching the waist. If I stick to the 8 centimeters in between, that would get me somewhere along the lines of 32 centimeters under the waist as the cardigan's finished length. Sounds good.

Double the amount of decreases means I will have to cast on more stitches to allow for that, incidentally also fixing the problem of the bottom of the back panel being too narrow. With 6 stitches decreased in every decrease row, I would need to cast on 12 additional stitches. And by reading the decrease instructions, I'm pretty sure these extra stitches would need to go in the garter stitches next to the actual cables.
I would also need to start completely over.

Oh well.