Bad Biasing Yarn

After finishing Mom's birthday socks, I decided to cast on a simple stockinette summer top with the multi-colored Queensland Tahiti (49% cotton, 36% acrylic, 12% microfiber, 3% polyester). What a mess. Maybe I need to start at the beginning . . .

A few weeks ago I knit a nice swatch with this yarn and threw it in with a load of laundry before remembering I hadn't measured the "before washing" gauge. It washed well. I measured the "after laundry" gauge, assumed it was close to the "before laundry" gauge, and wrote out the numbers needed to knit my sweater.

I cast on. During various brain dead moments, I knit stockinette round and round. My calculations showed 120 rows to the underarms. When I hit 60 rows, I was way more than half there. Oops.

Also, the piece was biasing too much to ever look good on a human body. So after finally getting a "before laundry" gauge I took it off the needle, onto a piece of string, and threw it in the washer.

The row gauge shrunk over 10%. Fine. My calculations are all good and I might have happily continued knitting except I couldn't block out the bias.

Anyone have any experience with biasing yarn? If I knit the sweater back and forth in pieces will the biasing go away?

The yarn in this piece, over three skeins worth, is worthless. Now that it has done its shrinking, I'll never get it to knit at the same gauge as the rest of the skeins.

I'm so glad this isn't expensive yarn. You may never see it on this blog again.