Tips for Knitting Your Perfect Sweater

Knitting a sweater for yourself can be a fraught activity. You put so much time and effort (and money) into it, and you want it to be perfect, but often it just isn’t.

Sometimes the sleeves come out way too long (I have one of these; I left holes in the sleeves for my thumbs to go through and they’re still really long even using part of the sleeve as fingerless gloves), the body way too short (ditto) or somehow all of it can go wrong even though you’d swear you got gauge (yeah, I had one of those, too).

My solution to a lot of these problems is to design sweaters for myself, but I know not everyone can do that or wants to (even I don’t want to as often as I want to knit a sweater).

So how can we ensure a better chance of success? Check out the tips for knitting sweaters that fit from Karen Frisa, originally published in KnitScene. She advises really careful swatching, measuring and figuring to determine what you’re really going to get if you knit the pattern as written.

Hannah Baker tried these tips on a sweater she wanted to knit and wrote about her experience for the Interweave blog. I think you can tell from her smile that she loves the result!

How careful are you when you swatch for a garment? Have any horror stories? I’d love to hear them!

[Photo: George Boe, via Interweave.]

Generally I like knitting patterns where I feel like you can use whatever yarn you have (because my stash is big enough and I want to use it, thanks) and make a successful project. This is one of those times when a special yarn makes the process that much easier.

The Floral Bouquet Shawl from Xandy Peters uses a specific extended color pooling yarn from Feisty Fibers, which allows you to place the bobble flowers with increasing frequency as you knit the project.

It starts with a solid color yarn, then the two color yarn is added in, and you make a bobble whenever you encounter the color pops. This would be hard to replicate with other yarn that doesn’t have the extended color pooling built in.

The background of the shawl is ribbed, making the project reversible.

The shawl uses fingering/sock yarn and comes out to be an asymmetrical triangle that’s 54 inches/137 cm long and 36 inches/ 90 cm deep and 60 inches/150 cm across the top edge.

Xandy says the pattern is for intermediate to advanced knitters. Knowing how to work traditional bobbles would probably help, but there’s a great video tutorial for how to work the floral bobbles so you can practice on other yarn or even incorporate the bobbles into other projects.

The bobbles are five-petaled flowers but they also kind of look like starfish to me, which could be fun on a child’s cardigan or other pattern. They’d also be fun on the leg of a sock or around the brim of a hat for extra whimsy.

The pattern includes photo and video tutorials, and written and charted instructions. It also includes tips on what to look for if you choose to use different yarn for the project, and instructions on how to dye your own yarn to use in the project.

If you want to give it a try, you can find the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Xandy Peters]

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