13.04.2024

First of all a big shout-out to knithacker.com for their faboulous newsletter, where this pattern was featured in their February 4th issue. Somehow the Headline “Knit Your First Sweater With This Easy Pattern, Perfect For Beginners!” triggered me. :-)

As you perhaps know, you see something and immediatly want to start, no time time to wait, not time to waste. So i looked for the most bulky yarn my stash would provide and that was the good old “rh:ool 3fach”.
Gauge turned out to be 12st x 17r, so i did some magic math (rule of three) to adjust the pattern and started right away. The first sleeve seemed just fine, blocked it right away and tried one of the big main parts for some rows, but it turned out to be much to large.
After some frogging and ingnoring the math (math told me 79st, so i took 80 to have an even number) this seemed much better and i stayed with 60st. Finished that one after some hours (and days), blocked it and repeated for second sleeve and main part.

(Note to future me: please read the pattern again, even if you are pretty sure you know what it says)
I don’t know why, but i was pretty sure i had to sew those parts together using wipstitch and doing it on the wrong side. It worked quite well. And I thought the shape of the seam was a design feature. Turned out: it wasn’t. But now it happened, and if someone asks, i will tell them i planned this right from the start of the project. ;-)

I’m quite proud of my first knitted sweater, and kind of surprised that it looks so good and, even more surprisingly, fits so well. If you never tried knitting a sweater yourself, just try this one!

Learnings:

• blocking helped a lot bringing the parts to the same size
• changing needles from KnitPro Carbonz to Chaigoo metal mid-projetct didn’t help keeping the size though ;-)
• sewing isn’t that complicated and time-consuming as i thought it would be. (but perhaps, thats just because i took the wroing stitch?)
• hiding and keep such a time consuming project secret from your gf isn’t that easy, especially when she gets suspicious and starts asking trick questions ;-)

Specs:
overall:

• Cast-On: Tillybuddy’s Cast-On
• Bind-Off: Jenny’s surprisingly stretchy bind-off

sleeves (knitted upside down):

• main: start with 52 stiches decreasing by two stitches every 5 rows as described in pattern / 58 rows
• cuffs: 34 stiches / 12 rows 1x1 ribbing

front/back:

• cuffs: 60 stitches / 12 rows 1x1 ribbing
• main: 60 stitches / 90 rows stockinette

sewing:

• wipstitch (yes, i know now)

• wrong side facing up (yes, i know now)