**Finish date: 24 Oct 2024** Finished project ##### 🧶 Project Goal The goal was to create a very squishy sweater that would be easy to roughly fit and test as I knit it, with simple shaping, and that would be easy to knit on auto-pilot while still having some kind of visual interest to the pattern (and not drive me crazy just being ribbed or stockinette). The sweater actually started a couple of years ago and got set aside when I took a big break from doing any textile work. ##### Finished Project Photos ![[IMG_1412.jpeg]] ##### Overall Structure and Goals I needed a sweater for cold weather that was neutral in color — ideally gray, something that would slot in well with the rest of my cool weather wardrobe. I wanted something I knew would look great with my favorite plaid A-line skirts that I love wearing. I knew I wanted it to be fitted, and I knew that yoke sweaters tend to flatter me _and_ be a pretty easy knit. I knew I wanted it to have a ribbed motif, but I thought that by adding a cable to the rib sparingly it would add interest to the sweater and the knitting process. I knew I wanted this sweater to be squishy with lots of loft in the yarn. To get that quality, I knew I would prep and spin the fibers to maximize that quality. Choosing to card the fibers would accomplish a couple of things: it would prep the fibers for that loft, and it would blend the wool and the alpaca at the same time. I chose to spin the fibers with a long draw double draft on my Peruvian pushkas since this would also maximize the loft of the final yarn — Peruvian pushkas are very lightweight drop spindles and their weight helps produce a lofty yarn. I chose to create a 2-ply yarn and plied on my Peruvian chaj-chaj spindle. I normally start with a sketch for my sweater designs, which I’d show here, but I didn’t sketch this one since it was a very simple design and very similar to one I’d already knit. ##### Fiber choice: Corriedale sheep wool and alpaca fleece Corriedale is a favorite fiber to work with, and I had sought out a beautiful award-winning Corriedale fleece from a local farm. I bought the fleece at the Monroe fiber market at the yearly festival, and the fleece was gray and came from a sheep named Clancy. I knew I wanted sheep wool because I needed loft and softness, so a short-to-medium staple length fiber with good crimp would be at least 60% of the fiber base for the yarn. The fleece was clean but otherwise unprepped. Clancy’s fiber is so wonderful that I contacted the shepherd and bought a second fleece of his for even more projects! To darken the fleece, add further softness and warmth, and of course make it even more personal, I added black alpaca from my boy Benz. Benz would pass away in September 2024 at the ripe old age of 18 while I was working on the sweater, which makes the sweater a wonderful sentimental way to remember the last of our first herd of alpacas and our sweetest boy in the herd. ##### Yarn construction: a lofty 2-ply I chose a 2-ply yarn construction because I was going for loft and warmth as opposed to strength and drape. Most of my spinning these days is done on spindles as opposed to a spinning wheel, and I was planning on doing that here as well. Peruvian pushkas are extremely lightweight spindles that lend themselves wonderfully to a long draw double draft, so that’s what I chose to spin the project on, using a carded prep of rolags that were a 60% Corriedale and 40% alpaca blend. This method of spinning goes really fast and is very portable, which was another bonus for this sweater project. ##### Sweater construction and fitting notes I knit the sweater starting at the neck and knitted top down in the round with a yoke, putting the sleeves onto holders and continuing with the body. The neckline is a very short 1x1 rib. I used short rows at the back neck to shape the sweater more appropriately. The main needle size was a 5, and I switched to a size 4 when doing ribbing and cast-offs. Other than some rough math to determine the cast on for the neck and to plan for my stitch pattern to work out, I didn’t do any math to shape the sweater dimensions — this was one of my fly-by-wire sweaters. I could get away with this for two reasons. First, I was willing to risk the ~10% slop that comes from fitting a pre-blocked, not-fully-finished sweater. The main reason why I was willing to risk this was because the yarn for this sweater is very lofty and squishy and therefore doesn’t drape or hang as much under its own weight when compared to a denser, drapier yarn. And second, the sweater is ribbed, so the stretchiness and fit could be somewhat inexact. **It’s important to note, though, that trying on a sweater as you’re knitting it is very much not recommended**, especially for new knitters, because blocking and the full weight of the finished sweater should be in place in order to understand how it will actually fit. But in my cumulative experience, I knew I could get away with it in this particular project, knowing how much I could estimate in the fit as I went given the properties above. ![[IMG_3188.jpeg]] Detail of the neckline with short row shaping for the neck I chose to taper the sleeves down by doing regular decreases of three stitches every few inches, tracking the decreases with a running yarn so I could match the second sleeve. This was again done fly-by-wire and by trying on. In the end, I likely should have tapered the sleeve with one or two additional rounds of decreases, but that would have been difficult to do without awkwardly disrupting the stitch pattern. I’m happy with the sleeve having a bit more ease to it than initially planned. I chose to end the body with a tubular 1x1 rib cast off, knit one needle size down, to give the rib appropriate stretchiness and appearance, but I did not do this well on the body! I somehow didn’t achieve the less-visible edge that tubular cast off usually gives. I did try to redo it and it improved it a bit, but I think I could do better next time I do this cast-off. I was annoyed when I realized I hadn’t spun enough yarn for the project initially — I’m normally pretty accurate! I was able to knit a sleeve and then barely begin the second sleeve before I ran out. So I spun another skein…and somehow that was only enough to make most of the second sleeve and I had to spin yet another! The finished sweater weighs 13 ounces.