Knitting

The Sweet Knit Sweater

March 8, 2019
Cover image for the Sweet Knit Sweater

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Hi there! Today I will tell you all about my first knit sweater, the Sweet Knit Sweater. It started as a simple KAL that went sideways. (I think I’m starting to see a pattern here.)

I want to say right off the bat that this sweater came from Sewrella’s First Holiday Knit Sweater and you can find the pattern here! The end result is “slightly” different, but due to factors around me and not her pattern. If you see her page you’ll see the pattern is clear and there are tutorials to help in the most tricky parts (which I did follow).

I often found myself straying from the pattern, which inevitably got me to a different result. Nevertheless, I’m not one to let good stitches go to waste, so let me tell you how the Sweet Knit Sweater happened.

Detail of yoke from Sweet Knit Sweater

Inspiration

I am on a quest to improve my knitting, so after the Winter Knits Set I decided to step up my game. Fortune had it, that more or less at the same time, one of my favorite designers, Sewrella announced she was starting a beginner-friendly Knit-A-Long and the project was a beautiful holiday knit sweater! Below you can see Sewrella, modelling her First Holiday Knit Sweater.

Pure coincidence? I think you mean pure fate!

This was so exciting! If I participated, I’d have a great pattern to follow, but most importantly, I would have the guidance and support of all the other participants in the KAL. It was perfect! 🙂

Or so I thought…

As soon as I looked at the yarn required, an alarm sounded in my head. It asked for a bulky weight yarn that, of course, I did not have in my stash. What I did have, was quite a few skeins of Drops Air. (I know, it’s getting old…) So now I have the following choice: either I try to do this using a different yarn, with different weigh, with different needle size, try to make the necessary adjustments and hope for the best, or… I wait until I go to Lisbon or Barcelona, get the right yarn and then do it.

I’m not exactly the patient type when there’s a project at stake, so I think you can guess what happened there.

The Project

The project asked for two colors. My choice went to pink and pink. 🙂 I was in a sweet mood at the time and the light pink was really calling out to me.

As for the design, I tried following the pattern as best as I could. I swatched to know my gauge and make the necessary adjustments. With the weight of my yarn being smaller than bulky, the number of rows and stitches for me was substantially higher. Oh well… knitter’s life.

However, this was going to make a big difference in the colorwork. For this project, I felt I had already bitten more than I could chew, so best give myself a break. I decided not to do the colorwork proposed and just go for simple stripes. But not plain simple. With different sizes to spice it up a bit! 😉 I guess I can’t help myself and just keep it simple.

So after a lot of rounds, finding that you only do knit stitches when knitting in the round, and watching tutorials quite a few times, I finally finished the sweet – instead of the holiday – knit sweater.

Lesson Learned

This was my first knitted sweater. I have been practicing the basic stitches and learning a few new techniques and by my third project, I made myself a sweater!

Now, I am perfectly aware that it is not perfect. Far from it. You can see that some details are not 100%. But that is OK! You can’t expect to be an expert at something you’re starting out, so you have to give yourself time. (Unless you’re a prodigy, and if so, that is awesome!) I am sharing my not-so-perfect project with you because I had a great time doing time it and I am happy with everything I’m learning. And sometimes that’s all you really need… to enjoy the process! 🙂 And that’s when you realize that your not-so-perfect sweater is actually AWESOME!

The image made for Pinterest of the Sweet Knit Sweater

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