When knitting bites back

Remember that handsome blue sweater vest I meant to finish for Boy 1 before the holidays? Still not done.

I was motoring away on it one Sunday morning, happy to have reached the armhole shaping for the front – and happy not to have arsed up any cable crossings (though I do know how to fix them now). While deciding when to begin the neck shaping, I held it up to the lad. That’s when I noticed the huge color shift when I started a new ball of yarn. Pretty noticeable, right?

Grrr. I did not notice that when I put the four skeins we dyed into a bag. I pulled all of them out again to look. I decided that two were well-matched, and the other two were also well-matched (but different from the first pair). Here are the two skeins I haven’t wound yet against the sweater front:

Dear reader, you know what happened next. Rrrrrrrrrrip! It took me a while to get the stitches back on the needle, the stitch markers back in place, and my chart row rediscovered. That took the wind out of my sails. I worked on it a little before our trip, but only up to where I was ready to shape the armholes. I meant to work on it on our looonnnnggg drive to Texas, but my brain just wasn’t ready. (Instead, I finished my spice market shawl, which I’ll share if the sun ever returns again so we can take photos.) BUT – while we were at our Austin haven, the peaceful and quiet home of Steven and Jeff, I felt the call of the cables. I worked those armholes and proceeded to divide for the neck. Then I didn’t pull it out again until we were on the road, headed home. Juggling charts can be a challenge in the car, but I discovered that a roll of washi tape works wonders:

When I finished the neck shaping on the first side, I compared it to my sweater back to determine how much longer to work before doing the final shoulder shaping. That’s when I felt this project bite me again – compared to the back, the fronts were too long! I went ahead and worked the other side of the neckline and figured I would sort it out when I got home (I didn’t have the back piece with me). Today I took a closer look and sure enough, the fronts are a bit longer than the backs. The front is next to the table and the back is on top of it here:

SO…. what to do now? I need to end up with 14 stitches at the top of the fronts, to match the 14 stitches at the top of the backs. I guess I could rip back the fronts a little bit and rework the last couple of decreases faster (like, every 2 rows instead of every 4). Or I could rip back the fronts a lot and start the v-neck one repeat earlier in the tree chart (which is the center panel). That would be back where the armhole decreases are, so I would be redoing those again for the third time.

I feel that this project will never end!!! How would you fix it?