My first clothing crochet! I made a few alterations from the pattern, including using a smaller hook size resulting in a gauge ~12dc x 8 rows = 70x75mm.

I ended up adding a few more rows as it was a touch short, and also did 9-10sc for the bottom hemming, and 13sc for the cuffs.

It all became a bit awkward once I got to the sleeves — I wanted to maintain some regularity in the sleeve stripe length, but the stripes would’ve been wider than I wanted if relying on the colour changes in the yarn, so there was a fair bit of cutting & joining every five rows.

I didn’t realise how much colours could differ between batches, so you can kinda see where different colour batches were used (especially in the light blue where some contains red, while other stripes are brighter & have a bit more green in them). A couple of the cakes I bought (not really knowing what my plans were) had weird blue-green-blue-green repeats, which further made trying to keep colours regular even more difficult, and I ran out for a few weeks during L4 lockdown where I had no red left!

• For the neckline, I shaped it a bit. I believe, after deciding how wide I wanted the neck to be, I did a dctog flanked by a dc for ~4 rows on the front, and ~3 rows on the back (I didn’t record it very well, so that could be wrong!). I counted out the stitches on the right-hand side, starting again from there after finishing the left.

• For the final row, I think I did something along the lines of doing a dc x1, dctog x1, dc x(?), hdc x(?), sc x8(?). My notes have gone walkabouts, though.

• Followed that final neckline row with a set of ~8 slip stitches on either side (which I messed up a bit in sewing together), and then single crochet all along the neckline — I’d intended on adding ribbing to the neck, but didn’t go ahead with it in the end.

• For the sleeves, I accidentally decreased by one every row for the first ~10 rows as I was still learning how to crochet in the round and wasn’t paying much attention to counting stitches once I figured out where I was going wrong, I settled on stopping the decr at 50 sts for both sleeves.

• At the end, I did ~3 rows with a decr every 5 sts (with the final sts of each row being 2-5). I then did one row of sc, and ended up being (I think) 32sts total.

• After doing one lot of cuffs (one row per stitch), I realised they were flaring out a lot. After messing with hook sizes & tension, I settled on doing decreases with the slip stitch (where each row of the cuff attaches to the sleeve) in a pattern of: ** 5sl, 1sltog, 5sl, 1sltog, 2sl, 1sltog, 2sl, 1sltog, 5sl, 1sltog, 2sl, 1sltog. The sltog was using the front loop only, and the (1sltog, 2sl, 1sltog) sections were concentrated on the top & bottom of each cuff.

• I think I used a matress stitch when sewing the shoulders together, but used a slipstitch to attach the sides (so the seam is visible on the sides, but I don’t mind it — I wanted to try make something consistent knowing that the blue might show up in the seam).

You can kinda tell how many months this took (doing various amigurumi projects in between) when comparing the ribbing for the bottom hem & the cuffs — although there’s variation in the hook size I used, the cuffs are way more consistent compared to the bottom. If I were to somehow be able to change anything, it’d be the bottom (along with how I attached it — I’d have actually probably done the bottom ribbing last, attaching it like the cuffs, with a row of sc to attach it to).

I did make a hella woopsie towards the end, just as I’d finished weaving everything in. Trying to repair a missed ds at the top of the sleeve, I accidentally nicked the wrong thread — and, for some reason, in a sleepy haze I pulled out several more. It was not how I was planning on learning to do repairs, but I maanged to get most of the ds for the blue row repaired without any visible issues. However, the break went over two rows, and when it got up to repairing the second row (where it switched into orange), well… things didn’t go so well.

But, overall, I’m happy with it! It’s not perfect, but for a first clothing piece, it was never going to be perfect! I loooove how soft the Lionbrand Mandala yarn is! The colour transitions being uneven & sometimes in weird patterns was a huge pain, but I’m too new to crochet to know if that’s a common thing to expect or not.