My yarn was a bit thinner than the pattern, so I did some swatching, and some calculations, and decided to knit the 42” size on 6mm needles to come out at 36”. Which worked, apart from the neck - I did the lower neck, but the first time I did it it was practically strangling me, so I ripped it out and missed out the first pattern repeat. It’s still not as low as I’d imagined, but it’s better.

I used stitch markers between the pattern repeats, and when it came to put the sleeve stitches on holders, I left the markers in place, so when I came to pick up the underarm stitches for the the sleeves, I just incorporated them into the pattern according to my markers, which sidestepped the problems with the pattern as written nicely. The sleeves are a bit tight, despite me doing them on 6.5mm needles, but they’re wearable.

For the cast off, I did three rows of garter stitch after the last pattern row, then on the next right side row, I did the yarn overs from the pattern, but not the k2togs, then cast off on the wrong side as normal, this gave a nice wavy edge, without the fussiness of the picot bind off. Plus I hate doing picot bind offs!

I love the way the handspun yarn has come out - I spun it from the fold, so there are short lengths of each colour instead of the more usual stripes, it’s more like a variegated yarn. I used almost all my yarn, there’s just a very small ball left.