Hey,

y’all know I began knitting a few months ago, and well, I got the bug.  My crazy love for sweaters combined with this new knitting fever made it so that I had no choice but to knit my first sweater!  I picked the easiest pattern I could find, as I’m new at this, grabbed some old yarn in my stash and started the project on a wimp.

You can find the free pattern for the sweater here.

 You know from a previous post that I was working on that, but let me just tell you my experience with the pattern from a beginner’s perspective.

Overall, it is a great pattern.  Different sizes, gauge to work with, and it has been made over 200 times.  The instructions were fairly simple and as I had previously crocheted a top-down sweater I kinda had an idea of how it was supposed to go. Or at least I thought I did…

Things I learned:

– How to double increase.  I had to frog the first few inches as I realized that I didn’t increase as it was supposed (double increase instead of a single increase).  Oh well, a very beginner mistake I will not make again!

– It is better to slowly decrease.  I thought the pattern’s waist decreases were quite strong and all at the same spot, and in my opinion, they were.  When it was time to increase I went more smoothly and it looked better.  Not having enough knitting experience probably account for that “mistake”, even though I should have treated the decreases just like I used to do in crochet.  Oh well, lesson learned for next time.

– Knitting stockinette gives a lot of stretch.  My sweater turned a little big on me, although I hear it’s in fashion these days.  Next time I may want to knit a size smaller to account for that stretch.  The sweater on me looks closer to a “boyfriend sweater” than the adjusted version you see on the pattern.

– Arm holes.  In this pattern I found that the arm holes were giant!  Well, it may or may not be my fault, as I stopped counting rows and knitted until I was closed to the underarm before shaping the arm hole.  I have large arms for my size so I thought I should be conservative working the arm pits, but then I had to frog one sleeve because it was GIANT!  They are still quite large, more than what I would’ve like to, but I’ll keep them that way because I just don’t want to spend another week fixing that issue when I could be knitting something else.

– Ribbing. Since it was my first knitted sweater I wanted to stay as true as possible to the pattern.  I first thought that I should do ribbing instead of the garter stitch but since I only had practiced it once I didn’t feel confident enough to make that change.  Well, I should have.  Ribbing looks much nicer and tightens the sweater in the right spots.  Next time I will not use the garter stitch. 

Here it is!  I strongly suggest you give this pattern a try, and then adjust it to your measurements.

Happy knitting!