My First Sweater

The February Lady Sweater pattern is hugely popular on Ravelry - a viral knit, of sorts, that's known for being flattering to a lot of body shapes and of simple construction. In fact we saw many, many incarnations of it being worn at Stitches Midwest. So, when I bought my first sweater quantity of yarn I tried to make sure I had enough yarn to try this popular cardigan. It seemed like a good place to start for someone like me who knows next to nothing about knitting sweaters.

Now it's knit from the top down, and from the moment I started I was unsure if it would fit me. I went through many stages of taking it off the needles to try it on to try to decide if it was too small and where the garter stitch yoke section should end and whether or not it was almost meeting under the arms like the pattern said or needed to be closer to almost meeting. (Of course, if I bought a cord that was longer than the 32" circular I've been using I wouldn't have to take it off the needles, but I couldn't bring myself to place an order for just one cord for a sweater that might or might not succeed anyway.)


Fortunately, Ravelry is a good place for reassurance and having read through many other people's February Lady project notes I discovered that I unwittingly made a pretty good choice of yarn - at least if I want it to be bigger instead of smaller. Apparently Dream in Color Classy has quite a reputation for blooming into a much more stretched out version of itself when washed, so while a lot of people report freaking out at how much their sweater had grown when wet, I was reassured to think that at worst it was going to get bigger and I could work on shaping it to fit me if I was a bit off on my guess of which size to knit.

So after a few months of off-and-on knitting I've finished the body of the sweater and the first of the sleeves. It's a snug fit so far, but given a certain amount of blocking I think it should be about right. The biggest issue that makes me question whether I'll end up wearing it in public or not is the extra material that bunches near the armpits (which you can see a hint of in the picture below). When following the pattern, I ended up knitting a lot of plain rows past the raglan shaping to get the right size for the sleeve, but apparently this causes too much build-up of fabric near the arms. As an admitted sweater-knitting newbie, I don't actually know what I should have done to fix that, so I'll live with it and keep an eye out for that on future patterns. I'm certainly not going to rip out the whole sweater to fix it and there's probably little that can be done once it's all knit. If anything, I'm kind of hoping it's one of those things that becomes less noticeable when washed or worn.


Now for the last sleeve and some buttons and then we'll see how it works as an actual garment. I have to say, I love the color and the subtle variation of the yarn, so if it fits well enough it could easily become a favorite. And since I have some yarn from Stitches Midwest in sweater quantities I really need to get some decent sweater-knitting skills going here sometime soon!