Happy 2016!
While I’ve been busy sewing for myself and doing all sorts of house work, here I am leading off the year with my very first project for Felix which I’ve been calling Man Sweater.
Left to Right: Meg’s Josh, my Felix, and Michelle’s Mike
Update: My Ravelry Project Page with Detail Notes on Knit Alterations
Felix has actually never wanted me to sew or knit him anything. I know right?! He’s had this fear that if I took the time to make him something and he never wore it, that I’d be angry. (This is probably correct. My Felix is a smartie.) So he just wanted to stay out of the fray and buy his clothes instead. He’s only wearing this now because I was the one who wanted to knit this up for him.
Of course Meg, Michelle & I saw this pattern (aka the Lumberjack Sweater) pop up on Ravelry and we mutually agreed this would be a great sweater to make for the men in our lives. The pattern seems easy enough for a first-time man-sweater maker. (Hint: this is an incorrect assumption & more on that later!)
Felix and I picked out the yarn for this sweater when we were in Paris from a shop called Lil Weasel. It was a charming shop and the price of yarn was quite reasonable to boot. They have both a yarn shop and a fabric shop right across the way from one another (yarn is reasonable, fabric not so much).
I should add there’s a lovely little cafe/wine bar next door that I visited not once but twice, if you happen to be in the area yourself.
Since this was Felix’s first time actually looking at yarn in any serious kind of way, I picked out the type and he simply picked the color. Felix overheats quite easily and rarely wears sweaters to work, even in the winter months. But since our house does get quite cold, I knew he’d eventually wear the sweater. Not wanting him to get too hot in it, I decided on a Rowan 50/50 mix of wool & cotton.
Felix is a man of simple taste. His wardrobe consists of various shades of grey, black, browns, and the occasional colors – in muted tones of course. So it seemed to make the most sense for him to pick out a nice grey that he could layer easily & I knew he’d end up wearing it more comfortably than a brightly colored knit that I might have preferred. But believe me, he’s slowly getting introduced to some new colors.
Michelle is experienced with knitting for her husband, Mike. But for Meg and myself, this was our first hand-knit man sweater. I can’t speak for Megan, but I felt like I was starting all over from scratch about how to ‘fit’ a garment. I felt like quite the newbie knitter.
Lumberjack is a top down, raglan style sweater. The neckline stitches are picked up again later on and the collar is worked into the sweater (1×1 ribbing).
I measured Felix’s chest and waist and picked my size accordingly, with the correct gauge of course. I cast on and started working on the sweater to the point where you divide the sleeves from the body & work the body in the round. He tried it on and it was awful – a joke!
It was waaay too large even though I was on gauge and picked the ‘correct’ size. I ended up frogging the entire thing and sizing down two sizes. I worked to the same point again – but the second time there were just too many stitches on the sleeves for his arms while the chest and back area were alright.
Frogging back once more a few inches, I slowed down my raglan increases (aka fewer increases) on the sleeves while keeping the increases on the front and back body the same as the pattern.
Third time is a charm I guess. Kinda sorta.
I still feel like there’s too much pooling at the armpits – but I continue to be told that’s just the way a raglan sweater fits. It’s a personal preference thing.
We all met up last weekend to take photos at the Lincoln Park Conservatory. It’s the perfect location for photo taking as its bright, just like being outside but warm enough inside in the winter weather. I’m sure I’ll be going back here for photos of me in my stuff soon.
Coincidentally this is the same place Meg, Michelle, and I came for our first knit photo shoot in December of 2013. How the time flies!
It seemed only fitting that we had the guys pose for us, now that we were on the other side of the camera.
They’re goofballs – look at the progression of Josh in the middle. Laughed so hard I cried going back over these images.
They were good sports about all of this. But we did pay them off in chocolate and hand knit sweaters.
Once the sweater body is joined in the round, there ceases to be any shaping to the body whatsoever. Michelle advised me that there should be some decreases to create shape and was scoffing at the pattern pretty hard at this point. I followed suit and decreased like she does for Mike.
Well… I ended up frogging the body back a great deal also. I should have known better here though – Felix is shaped nothing like Mike or Josh and he really doesn’t need any decreases from chest to waist as he has a much shorter torso and is a bit thicker as well. So this one was on me.
But back to the pattern instructions…
The instructions for the body of the sweater are just plain odd. What I mean is that the length given is so loooong. Yes, Felix does have a short torso and didn’t need as much yarn. But Mike and Josh are tall with long bodies. They didn’t even need the full length that the pattern suggested we knit. I bought yarn according to the size and the shop was 1 ball shy of what I needed. Yet I still have 3 left-over skeins! It’s such a waste. It’s not like I can fly back to Paris and return my extra skeins. I know Michelle also has 2 extra balls of yarn from this sweater and her yarn was much more expensive than mine was and Meg had like 4 left over and her guy is the tallest of the three! In short, it’s just not right.
One alteration I made was to add in some short rows near the hem of the body of the sweater, in the front only. I know Felix won’t like me saying it but he does have a bit of a tummy (it is post-holiday season after all) and needed a bit of extra length here. Adding length to the whole body would only accentuate the difference between his front and back – the sweater would be too long over his butt yet alright over his stomach. I decided to add around 6 extra rows to the front of the sweater – nothing too dramatic that you would even notice. I could have added a couple more, but I didn’t want it to be dramatic that someone could tell there were short rows added.
I would consider myself to be an Intermediate-to-Advanced knitter. I know how to do color work, cables, and alter most of my patterns to suit my preferences. I don’t really feel daunted by too many knits at this point and kinda feel a bit bad-ass even noting this. :D
But this sweater is not for a first-time sweater maker as the designer would have you believe. Sure it’s an easy knit. But when you have to pick up stitches from the provisional cast-on and the stitch count is not the same – a newbie knitter wouldn’t have enough confidence to figure out why and how to fix it. The designer has you lifting a bar to increase for the first raglan increases right off of the provisional cast on edge (which I blindly followed) and when you pull out the provisional edge to work the collar – these stitches basically disappear. So you can’t ever get the stitch count.
A designer would have also added in some waist shaping to accommodate for an average-shaped guy and also wouldn’t have us purchase 2+ skeins of yarn needlessly.
As a now-seasoned knitter and sewer, I think I’ve come to expect a higher standard for my pattern purchases. Which honestly I think is a good thing. I expect patterns to be designed professionally and with little errors. Of course there will be the random mistake here or there – I’m human after all and I get that this happens. But I can’t honestly sit here and say this is a sweater you should all run out and make as your first man-sweater when I know better.
This leads into a whole different discussion and I know I’ve opened a can of worms on this one: Higher Standards & Honesty.
I can go on and on about this topic & probably will do so at some point in the near future. But too often do we sit back and think “It’s probably just me” or praise something to the public while complaining in private. I think this is a dangerous habit I’ve been seeing within the crafting community as of late and I think it’s dangerous and I know many of you are with me on this. We just want to be positive and supportive and if we have nothing nice to say we don’t say it at all.
It’s great that we want to do this for each other – it’s what makes me love this community of creators. But honesty doesn’t have to be mean and honesty doesn’t mean we don’t support one another.
Okay I’m placing a lid back on this one for the time being. But feel free to comment if you like either about Felix’s first hand-knit sweater, how handsome these guys are, honesty in the crafting community, or anything really. :)
Cheers & happy knitting.
In: Knitting
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