Land Army-ish jumper

Well, this has been a long time in the making and I'm glad it's finished - I've probably knitted about 75% of it twice...

I've already blogged a bit about it here and here, so I won't repeat myself.  But I see that I'm about a year behind schedule on this one, despite starting the knitting in January!  I can also see that I haven't completed any of last year's autumn & winter knitting plans apart from this jumper, so I won't be making any plans for this year - although next on the needles will be an Audrey in Unst cardigan.

Pattern, in A Stitch in Time Vol 1, by Susan Crawford and Jane Waller

After knitting the body with smaller needles because my row tension was off with the needles stated in the pattern, I tacked it together and tried it on and decided that it was too clingy.  So that was the first lot of unravelling.  It fitted much better with the right size needles and either my row tension miraculously changed, or I can't count, or it didn't matter because I'm pretty sure I followed the pattern instructions for the armholes exactly.  I can't be sure though because I wrote my notes down with a Frixion pen and following an accident with a cup of tea they vanished.  So although these pens are great because you can rub the writing out just like a pencil, they are not waterproof!

So, after reknitting the body I knitted a sleeve as per the pattern and tacked it in to place so that I had something to refer to when trying to work out the shaping top-down.

Sleeve knitted exactly as per pattern and tacked in place

This took a bit of trial and error with the numbers and increases and they don't look exactly the same because the originals are gathered into the sleeveheads, whereas mine aren't gathered.  They do puff nicely though.

Back view

As I knitted the sleeves down to the cuff I decided to do the shaping with a mixture of 'seamline' decreases and progressively smaller circular needles.  The first version was a bit too clingy (again) for my liking, cue the next lot of unravelling and reknitting.  However, it did make it easy for me to work out where to do the decreases and which needles to use so once reknitted it fitted much better.

Love these sleeve heads

 The final bit of unravelling was the original sleeve.  Knitting the second one was straightforward because it was the same as the first, and because I did it more or less straight after the first one I could still make sense of the notes I took (which were on a different bit of paper and escaped the tea incident).

I did wonder whether I would have enough wool to knit this with long sleeves and as it turned out, I ran out with about an inch and a half of the second sleeve still to knit.  A quick stash search on Ravelry revealed that one of my knitting friends had a skein with the same lot number in her stash and I'm so grateful that she was willing to part with it.  If I'd knitted the body to the length suggested in the pattern then the six skeins I had would've been enough, but I made the body about an inch and a half longer than suggested and so needed a little bit of a seventh skein.

Now  it's finished I love it and I think I'll be wearing it a lot, both with skirts and jeans.  One thing which I might do differently next time is make the bits at the side front neckline a bit wider - I do wonder whether, in wear, the sleeves will pull the neckline so that the shoulder seams don't sit on my shoulders.  If they do, I'll have to think how to tighten up the neckline, but for now I'm leaving it as is.