Jim Sweater

I've sewn and made a bunch of stuff since the last blog post about the Jutland pants, but it appears this blog is brought to you by the letter "J", so here's my Jim sweater*

* my dad's name is Jim, he's just had his 80th birthday, and no, I wasn't a good enough daughter to make him a sweater.

This is the first full size garment I've knitted and I now understand the tedium of "sleeve island".

The pattern is the Jim Sweater by Paula M. I'd previously knitted both her Thea top and her Basic Shirt t-shirt, as well as crocheting the Lucca hat. And I'd found all of those patterns well written and easy to follow.

This one, not so.

The instructions for the yoke, with increases at the shoulder and the 2x2 rib pattern were not clear at all and assumed some knitting knowledge of working in a pattern that I didn't have. I emailed Susanne (the pattern writer) and she tried to help but the language barrier and her knowing what to do meant we didn't get far. Eventually the Ravelry forum crowd talked me through it.

I rewrote the yoke instructions to be 4 rounds of increases which actually told me what to do at each row. Happy to forward that word file to anyone who owns the pattern and has found this blog post by  typing "Jim sweater yoke increases wtf" into a search engine.

Perversely, after giving little hand holding on the yoke section, the next section seemed to overexplain; telling me, twice, not to do something I would never have thought to do anyway, and that wasn't in the instructions. That made me worry that I was missing something all along that I was now meant to stop doing. Ravelry again came to my rescue with an explanation.

Finally I had the body done and could start on the sleeves...

and yep, that took forever!

I finished it just before we went on holiday in September and took it with me, but it hadn't been blocked and was feeling sloppy and the sleeves were weirdly twisting. Curiously, the sleeves seemed to both be rotating anti-clockwise so I guess it's something to do with knitting in the round. 

Now that I've finally blocked it, it's behaving perfectly.

I used Cascade Ultra Pima Cotton in grey and navy, using most of 5 skeins of the grey and about 1&1/2 of the navy. Size M with 4.0 needles to get gauge.

It's not a superwarm sweater being cotton., But on this day when it suddenly got into the mid twenties after so many cold days it was getting hot!