My First Sweater

i can finally write about a recent knitting project, and the first i'm featuring on my blog.



isn't it cute? it's a baby sweater that i just gave to our neighbors paula and roger to celebrate the birth of their son matthew.

christina, the owner of article pract, my favorite local yarn store, wisely convinced me to knit a sweater for a baby before i tackled an adult-sized sweater. i think it came out pretty good for my first sweater.

the pattern comes from a collection called "knitting pure & simple". theoretically this sweater should have been easy since it was knit in the round. for those of you that don't knit, sweaters can be either knit in pieces and then sewn together or knit in the round on circular needles avoiding sewing and seams.

it was pretty easy up until the point of joining the arms to the body of the sweater. i know i said that the theory is that knitting a sweater in the round is easy. well it may be easier but there is an art to "joining the sleeves" to the body. the knitting technical term is picking up stitches. i won’t bore you with all the details. i, as most of you that know me, am a perfectionist (a quality of the obsessive type). suffice it to say i had to rip out the sleeves (ripping means unraveling the knitted stitches) at least 5 times for each sleeve before i was pretty satisfied with how it looked.

the end result was good even with a few mistakes. all that matters is that paul and roger loved the sweater.

for me hand-knitting is not only a fun hobby but it's also a way for me to learn to let go of my perfectionist tendencies.