stratajobee

My First Ever Sweater!

April 2026

    I started knitting my first ever sweater in December 2024. About a third of the sweater was completed between then and February 2025, after which I went on a very demanding course and took an accidental vow of knitting celibacy for 10 months. I picked it back up just before I went on winter break, only to get the flu when I really had time to make progress, and stopped again until I finished the course in March 2026. When I came home from course, my work schedule slowed down significantly, and I basically dedicated my life to knitting to blast out the final half of the sweater in a month.

    There is something so satisfying about watching a garment slowly print itself in your hands. It starts off as this silly little ring of stitches, and by the time the fair isle makes progress you start to see the pattern emerge. When I first noticed the hearts I had designed showing up in the fabric? Joy! Fat smiles on my face! And a renewed motivation to continue knitting. Finishing the body and being able to try it on for the first time made me realize that I'd actually be getting a wearable garment at the end of the project. The completion of the knitting was enough for me. I was too excited to wear the sweater to spend time weaving the ends in. Over a week passed before I managed to wash and block the wool. Any compliments I get on the sweater continue to feed me and my desire to make more clothing!

    For this sweater, I used the Cleome Smith Knits' Cozy Fit Pullover. The pattern works for 4 weights of yarn, and I did it with worsted weight. My gauge was much longer than it was wide, and I didn't think to make any edits to the pattern to accommodate that. I ended up with a bit of a wonky fit, noticeable in the slope of the shoulder when it's laying flat and how low my sleeves separate from the body. Since the shoulder issues aren't as obvious when I'm wearing it, it looks pretty good.

    Custom Fair Isle patterning was a bit of an ambitious undertaking for my first ever sweater, but I just wanted hearts on my sweater. Using graph paper and a pencil, I put together a 12-stitch-wide repeating column that included my big hearts. I wanted it to fade in on the chest and fade out before the belly of the sweater, but accidentally drew up the pattern to be too long. Changes had to be made to the pattern in the middle of making it to achieve the fade look I wanted. Not only did I change the pattern mid knit, but I also messed up knitting during the change, so there's a pretty noticeable line where the flow is interrupted around the sleeve cutoff line.

the flat lay of the sweater before the wash and block. Image shows a rusty orange coloured knit wool sweater with cream coloured fair isle patterning including heart shapes.

The write-up is still in progress! I still need to add: