Blatherskite

I finished my second NaSweKnitMo sweater! Not quite in November, but pretty close!

First off, I love it. I absolutely love it. As a design, I think it’s fabulous. I love the neckline, I love the sleeve cuffs, I love the tunic-style of it. What drew me to it first, though, was the way the fair-isle part of the sweater was broken up by the main color. It gives the optical illusion of a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt (to me, anyway). And I kind of dig that. It’s different, you know?

As a pattern, it’s wonderful. It looks complicated, but the pattern is really easy to remember and kind of figure out as you go along. I screwed up in the first two rows but after that it went really well. I think I screwed up because I was thinking too hard. I was scrutinizing the chart too much. When I looked at the pattern holistically it made sense to me and I could knit without messing it up.

I’m a newbie at Fair-Isle. This was my first Fair-Isle sweater. So my stitches were kind of lumpy and bumpy. I knitted this with both hands and the stitches coming off of my left hand were way loose. So loose that it screwed up my row gauge. I had to cut out a whole pattern repeat. In the last repeat I got more used to knitting with my left hand and my stitches are more even.

Oh, and I also read a really good thread on Ravelry about loose knitting and how to fix it. So I tried the suggestions, and they worked great! They were: 1)knit close to the tips of the needles and 2)make sure you have good tension on your working yarn. I taught myself to knit over 10 years ago and had noone to correct my bad knitting habits. So I am so happy to have found that forum thread. Maybe now I won’t have such horrible gauge issues.

Tech stuff:

1. I knitted the size medium. I started out knitting the largest size but I could see pretty quickly that it was going to be way too big for my taste. So I frogged and knitted the medium.
2. As many people before me have said, the count is completely off on the neck stitches at the end when you start the garter rows. I actually just ignored that number and knitted the neckline with the stitches I had on the needles. When I finished the sweater and tried it on I didn’t like how floppy the garter section was and I didn’t like how the neck started at my shoulders. So I frogged back the garter section and and added 4 more stockinette rows and 2 more alternating decrease rows. Then I did the garter section where I did two more decreases in the knit rows of the garter section.
3. This sweater looks way better after it has been blocked. It was hella lumpy when I tried it on right after knitting it but the magic of blocking took care of that.

There you go! Road to Golden. I love it.