Fern & Feather Sweater

I finished my first colourwork sweater! It also might be the shortest time that I’ve ever taken to knit a sweater. I don’t necessarily mean how many hours I spent on it (because I didn’t keep track), but if we track from first stitch to blocking, it was only March 6 that I bought the wool. And promised myself that I would finish my other sweater before I cast on this one – notice how you haven’t seen another sweater recently? Yup, I’m a huge liar and still have to finish the other one. Is this how it begins, knitters? This is the slippery slope to project bags in every crevice of your home and thousands of WIPs that you’ll never complete? The thing is though, that I’m already back to the other sweater, so I’m trying not to go down that path. But let me leave my hypothetical shame spiral and just tell you about this sweater that IS complete and in front of you right now.

The pattern, before I forget to tell you, is the Fern & Feather sweater from Jennifer Steingass. I had heard that her patterns were a good place for a beginner to start with yoked sweaters, and I really loved a lot of her designs. In terms of shaping of the sweater, next time I do one of hers I will probably dispense with the hip shaping and keep it at the same circumference down from the waist area. As is typical for me lately, the size that fits my shoulders is too big on the bottom half of my torso, because climbing. It’s a nice cozy shape, but I think I’ll experiment with it being slightly more fitted in the waist/hips next time I do one of her patterns.

I started off using the recommended needle size for my swatches (yes, I swatched! 3-4 times!), but wasn’t getting gauge OR a fabric that I really liked the look of. It was super stiff and dense and didn’t look like it would be comfortable or nice to wear. So instead I swatched with a couple bigger needle sizes until I got a fabric I liked and then determined the stitches per inch and calculated how many stitches I’d need in total in order to get the circumference I’d need around the bust. Then, I searched in the pattern in the area where the bust is until I found which size was closest in stitch number to the amount I’d calculated. Then I knit that size and did length adjustments as necessary. I didn’t change anything in the yoke because I was too scared and inexperienced, but I think I could have done with decreasing faster in the sleeves because they’re quite slouchy in the bicep area – something I’m not mad about but would potentially change in future. The pattern has you do a decrease row and then six normal rows a bunch of times, and I did a few 5 row gaps, but I think maybe I should just do them all at 5 row increments and then it would’ve been improved. Other than that, didn’t change anything about the pattern other than doing a different size based on my yarn.

The yarn I used is this glorious hand-dyed (locally!) wool from Fleece Artist here in Nova Scotia. It’s aran weight, I believe, and I got it at The Loop. Shoutout to The Loop pretty much always having enough yarn to knit a sweater in a given colour. This one I didn’t actually have to worry about dye lots because it already has variation in colour due to the way it’s dyed. I really love how this shows up in the final garment; it gives the colour so much depth! This is a colour called Mustard, I think. I’ve still been percolating on colour palette for my wardrobe (in the summer I hope to get back to the Curated Closet process), and I think this mustard-y colour is one of the ones I love and that looks good on me. Also, the Fleece Artist yarn is so beautiful and lovely to knit with and I am resisting the urge to go out and immediately buy more of their wool to make another sweater.

So, I am in the camp that I don’t think it’s good practice to point out areas where other people could improve on their work without being invited to, or to give advice that wasn’t asked for. I’m also in the camp that doesn’t like when people jump to pointing out flaws in their work right away. But I’m kind of going to do the latter, and in this case INVITE knitting people to give me tips on how to correct the flaw. The flaw: my tension in the colourwork. And I know it’s not that bad. It basically blocked out aside from some mild rippling that you might be able to see above. It doesn’t bother me. I’m not going to go back and fix it. I think the sweater looks great as is. My invitation is for you to give me your tips on how to get looser tension for longer floats. The puckering I got happened when there were 7-8 stitch floats in the contrast colour. Otherwise I don’t think I did a terrible job with it, I just want to improve in that area for next time. Because there will be a next time – I’m super into this whole top-down sweater thing! I love being able to try it on as you go, and also get the big design feature out of the way at the beginning.

I realize that I just finished a big cozy sweater just in time for summer here in Nova Scotia. Even taking these photos I got a bit sweaty, honestly. And I didn’t even have anything besides a bra on underneath! So it will be going into my drawer until the fall, but I can already tell I’m going to get a lot of wear out of it. And now, let the summer of sewing swishy dresses begin! (Also, if you’re wondering, the jeans in all of the photos are Closet Core Ginger jeans that I made a few years ago and wear ALL THE TIME).