Navy Sweater: Neckline and Pattern Problems

Hi everyone! I wanted to knit myself a new sweater for quite a while, but I never felt comfortable to do it. This year, I finally decided that it was time to actually make myself one! Even though I started with the best of intentions, I ran into many issues with the knitting pattern I used. This caused me to do a lot of research and deep digging in my memory in order to remember how to knit a sweater without a pattern.

I was able to figure out what I was doing, but it wasn’t easy. So far, I spent at least a month and half knitting this one sweater and didn’t get very far. I am very annoyed and frustrated with the pattern. So, to speed up the knitting process and avoid more mistakes, I decided to take a lot of sweater knitting patterns I love and are more familiar with, and mush them together to create this sweater. This has sped up time and made things go a lot faster. It’s still annoying slow, but progress is not only visible, it looks great!

Along the way, I decided to take photographs of my sweater knitting progress. Even though the photographs I’m showing in this post are no longer accurate for the progress in making the sweater, I still wanted to share them.

The photographs in this post are from when I finished the neckline and worked on the shoulder area.

This is what the neckline looked like…

And here is a close up…

Getting started was supposed to be easy to make, but it wasn’t. The pattern I used needed to be wet blocked once finished, so everything is scaled for wet blocking. Even though every stitch measurement will be off, I decided to use it as a base for the sweater and add more stitches to make it the right size without wet blocking.

Even though the pattern is meant for wet blocking, I quickly found out how poorly worded and explained the pattern is. Because of this, I had to remake the ribbed knit section twice. When I took these photographs, I realized I knitted the shoulder increases wrong. I know how to increase for ragland sleeves, but I decided to humor myself and the pattern writer to see if the instructions for the increases are written correctly. They weren’t. I knitted them wrong. So, after taking these photographs, I undid everything I knitted and started over using my tried and true increase technique. It worked perfectly.

As for the yarn, I used a 100% cotton, sport weight yarn from Jubilee Yarn. I found it on Amazon. I’m using the color Deep Ocean Blue. It is a dark navy shade. I really like this yarn. It is soft, affordable, and easy to find. So far I liked this yarn very much.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!