one more
This week I finished one more sweater for the current campaign for Afghans for Afghans (details here).
It's only one more sweater, but it will keep one more child warm for one more winter. I hope.
I used the same blue yarn as for the zippered jacket I finished a couple of weeks ago (also for A4A), but to keep things from getting too monotonous, I tried a slightly different pattern. Instead of a bulky top-down cardigan with garter stitch edges, this time it is a bulky top-down pullover with rolled edges.
I used a Knitting Pure and Simple pattern. KPS patterns are great standbys for children's sweaters. I like that they are seamless and that you can kind of figure out the sizing as you go. I've also never encountered an error, not a single one, and that speaks to the quality of these patterns. Unfortunately, this time around I had some strange gauge issues. For one thing, it turns out that my stitch gauge with this yarn is tighter in the round than back-and-forth (not that surprising, but kind of annoying when you do both in a sweater, though this one was mostly in the round so it didn't matter much). More significantly, my row gauge must have been much more compressed than the designer's (she doesn't list row gauge in her patterns, which is my sole complaint about them), so I ended up ripping out the top half of the sweater to add more non-increase rounds in order to keep the armholes from being comically shallow. The sleeves took a couple of tries as well. They were nearing the circumference of a garden hose before I pulled them out and re-knit them with the decreases spaced much farther apart. What's really strange about this gauge thing is that I knit the zippered jacket with a KPS pattern in the exact same yarn, using the same needle size, with no issues whatsoever. Gauge is a fickle thing, is it not?
The end result is that I have a sweater slightly smaller than I intended, but still well within the size guidelines for what A4A is requesting. It is warm and sturdy, and, thankfully, finished!
It's only one more sweater, but it will keep one more child warm for one more winter. I hope.
I used the same blue yarn as for the zippered jacket I finished a couple of weeks ago (also for A4A), but to keep things from getting too monotonous, I tried a slightly different pattern. Instead of a bulky top-down cardigan with garter stitch edges, this time it is a bulky top-down pullover with rolled edges.
I used a Knitting Pure and Simple pattern. KPS patterns are great standbys for children's sweaters. I like that they are seamless and that you can kind of figure out the sizing as you go. I've also never encountered an error, not a single one, and that speaks to the quality of these patterns. Unfortunately, this time around I had some strange gauge issues. For one thing, it turns out that my stitch gauge with this yarn is tighter in the round than back-and-forth (not that surprising, but kind of annoying when you do both in a sweater, though this one was mostly in the round so it didn't matter much). More significantly, my row gauge must have been much more compressed than the designer's (she doesn't list row gauge in her patterns, which is my sole complaint about them), so I ended up ripping out the top half of the sweater to add more non-increase rounds in order to keep the armholes from being comically shallow. The sleeves took a couple of tries as well. They were nearing the circumference of a garden hose before I pulled them out and re-knit them with the decreases spaced much farther apart. What's really strange about this gauge thing is that I knit the zippered jacket with a KPS pattern in the exact same yarn, using the same needle size, with no issues whatsoever. Gauge is a fickle thing, is it not?
The end result is that I have a sweater slightly smaller than I intended, but still well within the size guidelines for what A4A is requesting. It is warm and sturdy, and, thankfully, finished!
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