I have now knitted a few items for myself (1 wrap and two jumpers) and now the rest of the family (well, the kids at least) want in on the act! I managed to find some rather cheap yarn at Abakhan back in the summer and bought a jumpers worth in four different colours, one for each of my family. Although I much prefer to touch yarn before I buy it, I figured that for about 60p per ball, I couldn’t really go wrong! I bought 6 balls of Hopi Aran in the Rose / Beige colourway for my daughter and just hoped that we’d both like it 🙂
As it turned out the yarn is relatively soft and not at all scratchy – it feels a bit like a cotton even though there’s no cotton in it. So with 6 balls of yarn it was time to look for a pattern. I found this free pattern from Lion Brand Yarns. On reading the pattern it turned out to be not quite what I wanted – although the picture shows full length sleeves and a longer body, the actual pattern is for 3/4 length sleeves and a cropped body length. I was going to look for another pattern, but by this stage my daughter had seen, and fallen in love with the pattern, so there was no going back – I had to work out how to make it work!
I ended up casting on a few less stitches than advised for my daughters size for each sleeve and doing a couple more increase rows, following the pattern for the sleeves (so an increase row every 8th?? row, repeated an extra couple of times to give the full length of sleeves.) This worked out surprisingly well, and although the sleeves are a bit too long, we’re not talking clown clothing, so I am rather happy 🙂 Extending the body was rather more straightforward, as this didn’t include any increasing or decreasing of stitches, just knitting a few more rows until I thought it was long enough (and that I’d have enough yarn left to knit the neckline!)
The body of this did prove to be rather tricky, I managed to introduce a stitch – if this had happened just about anywhere else I would have just ignored it as I didn’t notice until I’d knitted a few rows on, but unfortunately it was front and centre, and very obvious! As such, I had to rip back a few rows, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realise quite how many stitches there are in each row, but still, I did it, and I’m glad I did.
About half an hour after that though my needle broke! I was using a circular needle, as recommended and the cable came away from the pin. I just managed to rescue all of my stitches, but needless to say the people in the train carriage probably wondered what on earth I was swearing about. (under my breath I might add!) My husband managed to fix it though, fortunately.
The rest of the construction was quite easy, although actually getting the sleeves in was a bit of a challenge, purely due to the lack of space to try and manoeuvre the needles when putting in the sleeve pieces. I really like the way that the eyelet yoke doesn’t have any seams, I think it really finishes the garment.
I should probably also note that the pattern has a button and button hole at the top for closure, but my daughter didn’t want this, so I didn’t bother 🙂 All in all though this has been worn many times since I finished it, so I’m taking that as a sign of approval. Now I’ve just got to get on with the makes for the other family members!
