SoleCrafts: A Tale of Two Sweaters

Whilst I'm here at the computer I also want to document two sweaters that I've finished in the last week or so.

The first was a red fleece sweater.

I started with the basic sloper pattern that I created, then cut a yoke on the front and back pieces. I then changed the front dart into a princess seam.

I added pockets into the front princess seam. This is the one area that didn't work perfectly. I'm not sure if there is just too much flare in the front seams, or it was just the way I put the pockets in, but unfortunately that front area does not sit nicely.

Again all seams were finished with the new overlocker and a separating zipper was added to the front seam.

I don't think its a bad first attempt. With a little tweaking I know I'll make this again.

The second sweater is a knitted sweater.

The wool is a 100% superwash merino sport weight yarn from Cascade Yarns. Colour 114. When I originally bought the yarn I was planning on using it to knit a pair of leggings...However after much thought I decided that, after spending all that money I wasn't willing to take a chance that they would not get worn so decided to make it into a sweater instead. But of course I didn't have quite enough yarn to make a long sweater - so I knitted the sleeves first to the length I needed then just knitted the body till I ran out of wool.

The pattern is self made. I knitted up a swatch in a number of different needle sizes and chose the one that gave the gauge I wanted, not to tight, but no big holes. I then calculated how many stitches I would require in the body and worked upwards to figure out how many stitches to cast on.

It was knitted top down in the round so the first element I had to figure out was the neckline. I knew I wanted a cable down the front and I wanted the cable to wrap up around the neck line and ended up bringing that ribbing up into a collar.

To figure out the cable down the front of the sweater I again swatched a number of different options before picking the one that I was most happy with.

On the back I knew I wanted one big cable detail.

I knitted downwards from the collar, increasing front and back for the raglan sleeve. Once I joined the front and back under the arms I put the main body of the jumper aside and knitted the sleeves to ensure that I had enough wool to finish them.

At the ends of the sleeves I knitted more cable details.

The cuff ended up a lot tighter than I had planned so when I got the to bottom band, rather than do the same cable details I did a knit 4 purl 2 ribbing with just 5 of the cables spaced around the band and the front cable continuing down into the ban in place of the 6th cable.