as a little warm up I did a very simple design on the bottom hem of my sweater and I love the way it turned out. 100% obsessed with stranded colourwork

While knitting the body of my sweater, I've been thinking about the design for the yoke (the top of the sweater) and trying out different things with some of the colours I've been wanting to use. A small tube is a great way for me to test out a design and see how it will look knitted without putting too much effort into it. It also gives me a chance to check how my tension looks for colorwork with that yarn. I love the flower / vine design at the bottom!

#knittinglove

After restarting a sleeve because I wasn't happy with how the cuff felt, I attached my sleeves to my sweater body and added short rows to the back of my sweater. Very interesting: I found out while designing this that in most cases you would add fabric to the back of the work, not the front, to create a shape that is well-fitting for most bodies.

Thanking my past self for adding a lifeline to the sweater because I had to rip back my first short rows and start over.
Time for the colorwork!

Once I started the colorwork, I was certain that I had picked the perfect colour to go at the bottom of my yoke! I love the way the red looks and the design is exactly how I wanted it.
I decided not to go up a needle size for the colorwork because I was already worried my sweater would be too big and I trusted myself to keep a good enough tension across colorwork to not need a bigger needle size.

My sweater is done! I managed to finish it “on time” last week and it looks exactly like how I imagined it would.

The fit is as good as I could hope for it to be for a first ever sweater knit from the bottom up. I changed my original design at the top of the yoke from pine trees to the same hem design I did at the bottom and on the cuffs (the pine trees just felt too “christmas”ey).

This has been a wild experience and I feel so much more confident in my knitting. 🧶

#knittinglove