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.]
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