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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
