Stripes Anyone?

Another project finished! I was so inspired after browsing so many patterns that people had created I wanted to try designing my own as well, and this is the result! I am pleased with the finished sweater, and learned many things along the way. I do have a record of what I did, but that is more for my own education than that anyone would want to make it, given the abundance of awesome patterns available. It is for a little boy, size 4. The chest measures 28 inches around, and the length is 16 inches. The sleeves are 13 inches long. I used size 5.5 mm needles for the ribbing and 6 mm needles for the body. They yarn is Bernat worsted weight, with rouge for the main colour and medium navy for the wide stripes. Cream is the other stripe colour. It required most of a 197 gm ball of the main colour, with some left over. This yarn is machine washable and dryable, according to the label.


Things I learned .... I did not attempt any fancy stitches on this one, but relied on colour for the pattern. That worked fine, but a drawback of using several colours, as fellow knitters will attest to, is that when you are finished, you have a multitude of yarn ends to weave in. I stopped counting ends at 56! For some reason, knitters like to knit and don't like to sew seams and weave in ends, and I am no different. And yet, I also do embroidery and cross stitch and that does not bother me at all to do all that fine work. Give me a bunch of yarn ends to weave in and it is an unpleasant but necessary job to finish things off!

In my enthusiasm I sewed both shoulders together before doing the neckband. That was a mistake. I now understand completely why patterns have you just sew one shoulder seam, knit the neckband, and then join the other shoulder seam. It was so hard to use both the circular needles and double ended needles to do this. I thought of actually taking one of the shoulders apart to do it again, but I did such a good job of weaving in the ends that taking them out again became another nightmare! And so I struggled through with the neckband.



 The stripes look nice as a pattern. But, it is hard to get the sleeve stripes to match up when you are winging it the first time. I would not make the top stripe so high next time as it meant the main colour and stripes do not really match up in some parts. I would rather have a better pattern match. Perhaps smaller stripes would have made this easier. So, this is my first sweater pattern. Back to following already written patterns again now. I am sure I will become more adventurous with my next write your own pattern creation.