Shoptastic

I made a sweater! I've made shrugs, started sweaters, but this is my first ever finished, I can wear it, it makes me feel cute and accomplished sweater! It is the Shopping Tunic from Twinkle's Big City Knits by Wenlan Chia. I've had the book for awhile and oggled the designs, but have been unable to afford any of the necessary super bulky yarn. Yesterday, in desperation for a finished sweater, I decided to use the Rowan Ribbon Twist I purchased nearly two years ago to make my "first" sweater, the Beth (I know). Here are the results:



Knitting Details:
The patterns in this book are horrendous, filled with errors and not at all clear. This one was no exception, but was fairly easy to figure out. Now the Ribbon twist is only a bulky yarn and so there was no way I could get gage, so I knit a couple swatches on both 19s (the size needle called for in the pattern) and 17s. I decided to knit the sweater on the 17s but two sizes larger than what should be my size -- voila it actually worked. I only made one alteration, besides making the cowl a couple inches shorter, which was to add some 1x1 ribbing at the bottom to keep it from riding up. It is supposed to be a tunic but it came out a bit short (I did knit it an 1" short but it shouldn't have been as short as it came out, I think it was the result of my monkeying with the gage). I used ~270 yards of yarn.

I would make this again. It was really easy and super fast. I love the cowl neck. If I did it again I'd skip the pockets: they aren't as cute as they looked in other people's blog pictures and they were a real pain in the ass. I think if I did it again I would do some sort of ribbed lower half and use a super bulky in a solid color.

So there you have it, a knitting post on a knitting blog, who'd of thought?