I couldn’t be more pleased with the way this turned out but I had many problems with it along the way.

On the face of it this sweater should not be that hard to knit, it’s a pretty basic shape after all and I was surprised by the difficulty rating when I decided to knit it. Well it is that hard because the pattern makes it unnecessarily difficult.

• Gauge

I could not get the suggested gauge with the suggested needle sizes so I ended up going down to a US 4/3.5mm needle for the garter stitch trim and collar. I used a US 6/4mm needle for the stockinette sections. My gauge usually doesn’t change when I do colorwork so I intended to use the 6 for that as well but somehow I made a mistake and started to use the 4 instead. This was a happy mistake because it turned out to be the perfect gauge.

• Colorwork

The first problem I ran into was the colorwork and I had to ask caitocaitlin for advice on how to deal with the decreases within the colorwork. http://www.ravelry.com/projects/caitocaitlin/nehalem
These are her instructions:

The first decrease round is round 4 of the chart, then every 13th round 3 more times and then every 15th round 2 more times. so it’s rows 4, 17, 30, and 43 of the chart and after the chart ends you just have to count rows. The left front and right front colorwork parts mirror each other, and this is accomplished by having stopping points at the side seams. the stitch slipping keeps those seams looking like neat vertical stripes of your c3 color. one of my progress pics shows this part; it looks like a white vertical stripe in the pattern.

• Picking up stitches for the button band and collar

There have been a lot of comments on the pattern page about how the colorwork is mismatched in the pattern photos. I think the problem is the pickup rate for the colorwork. The pattern says to pickup one stitch for every colorwork row. This didn’t make sense to me because in theory the colorwork should be the same gauge as the rest of the stockinette so logically the pickup rate should be the same for the colorwork as for the plain stockinette sections. The pickup rate for the plain sections is two stitches for every three rows so I stuck with that and it worked. IT WORKED SO WELL. My fronts are pretty much perfectly matched.

Now because of this I didn’t have as many stitches as the pattern called for, I actually had less stitches than the smallest size. I was sort of worried about it but the bands turned out to be the perfect length and there is no distortion around the button band. I did have to rework the spacing of the buttons but that was just some simple math.

I modified the shawl collar because I have a rather short neck so I decided that I didn’t need such a tall collar. I did the first set of short rows for the collar and about half of the second set of short rows before I bound off.

• Sleeves

I had a problem with the spacing of the increases on the sleeves which might have been due to my gauge but I was pretty much spot on with gauge. When I knit the sleeves they would already be longer than the pattern called for before I got to my last increases. I knit one sleeve three times before I got it right. I ended up spacing the increases an equal distance apart all the way up the sleeve. The right distance apart for me was five plain rounds in between every increase round.

I also modified other bits of it along the way because I never leave anything alone.