The Hitch Pullover caught my attention the first time I saw it, mainly because of the unusual shape of the collar. It looked so flattering on the model that I decided to knit it.

Knitting the body and the sleeves was easy, but assembling the pieces and knitting the collar was another story, at least for me…

Sewing on ONE sleeve took me a whole afternoon and evening, sewing on the second one went a bit better. But the most difficult part was knitting the collar. I don’t know how many times I had to restart knitting it. On the one hand, I did not manage to pick up the stitches neatly (there were a lot of holes which logically I didn’t like) and finally, when it seemed that everything was going well, I noticed that if I picked up the number of stitches called for in the pattern the collar would turn out too big/too high. Therefore I started once again,stopped picking up stitches when I was about 3 cm from the end, then I cast off all the stitches, stretched the ends a bit and sewed them to the button bands.

When I tried he pullover on after having attached the sleeves (before knitting the button bands and the collar) I was very discouraged, because it was everything but flattering…. I was about to give it up, but forced myself to finish it.

After all the difficulties that I’ve had with it (and after washing and blocking it), the pullover has turned out better than expected, but I would definitely not knit it again.

I almost find that it looks better with the collar folded down, but before I wear it that way I have to think about how to better hide some woven in ends.

These are the changes I made:

To get a smooth transition from the cuff to the sleeve cable pattern, I increased two stitches in the middle of the 1st row of the cable pattern and decreased them at the end of the same row (well, I decreased one stitch at the end of the row, slipped the other stitch to the left needle and decreased it at the beginning of the next row).

I made the body a bit longer and added waist shaping

I made longer sleeves

I didn’t like how the button holes looked, started again and knitted them “my way” (1 yo and knit two stitches together through the back loop), and I also placed the holes a bit differently.