I knitted a jumper! And it only took a year, lol!

After my flurry of knitting during the locksdowns early in the pandemic (when I was furloughed), I allowed myself to buy some new yarn – I had said I needed to knit a significant portion of my stash before I was ‘allowed’ to buy any new yarn, as my knitting is very intermittent. I do a bunch at once, then nothing for years!

The yarn is the Sirdar Country Classic in colour 0866, chartreuse. This is a less mustardy shade of yellow than I normally go for, but I still like it – especially because it’s a pretty bright, happy colour!

The pattern is the Monday Sweater by Petite Knit. The yarn was not quite the ideal for the pattern, but I thought a regular DK weight would be an okay substitution – she uses really expensive yarns in her patterns! I made the size S, with some changes to the sleeves – they ended up massively too long and too wide (possibly because of the inexact yarn substitution) so I had to frog a few rows and do load of decreases to get them down to the correct number of stitches – this gives them a slight balloon vibe, which isn’t necessarily what I was going for, but it’s good enough and to be honest I just wanted it finished by that point!

Speaking of which, I pretty much knitted this jumper twice. Sigh. I knitted a lot of it during my Christmas break of 2022, and stupidly didn’t try it on at all until I had started the first sleeve. This was a mistake I definitely won’t be repeating in a hurry! I had apparently been doing the raglan increased in the wrong places as the body of the jumper ended up really tight, and the sleeves were massive – because they had half the body increases in them! It was pretty sad when I had to frog the whole thing – I knew I couldn’t leave it as it was. Then I (unsurprisingly) slightly lost interest in it, so it took me to the following December (2023) to finally finish it! Still not my record slowest knit though!

I do enjoy knitting, especially because it’s more portable, so I can do it in front of the tele in the evenings, or take it with me on trips (where I have the luggage space!) but I am very slow to finish things. I’m in a ‘I want to sew all the things’ mood at the moment, so my 2 current knitting projects have taken a bit of a backseat, so I’ll probably be even slower! Oh well, as long as I enjoy the process, I guess it doesn’t matter how long it takes!