Another sweater from the late 2019/early 2020 era of stretching swatches too hard and expecting too much wet block growth. As a result, this sweater fits way snugger than I planned. I had planned for a generous shawl-collared coat. It’s now a bodycon jacket. It was drafted on 2019-11-24, but only cast on 2020-05-07. Yet another data point that it never makes sense to design something and then knit it months later without re-checking the calculations. I learn so much each month, that the design is almost certainly obsolete and sub-optimal by the time I cast on.

I’m particularly sad because I have 1.5 skeins of this beautiful yarn leftover and it would have been the perfect amount to add to this sweater. If I hadn’t made this a seamed armhole, and if I had detected the problem sooner, I would have at least made the sleeve larger as well as the shawl collar.

Well next time…

Note that I also frogged a sizeable portion of this sweater and knit it from scratch when I thought the length between bottom edge and waist was too short. This was a good move, but I only wish I’d frogged the whole thing and also re-knit the overly-cinched bottom ribbing with 4.5mm needles instead of 4mm.

All things I will note for my next cabled sweater coat. I should have trusted my instincts on many fronts but this was knit at the height of the least pleasant part of the first COVID wave. (Really don’t want to think about it.)

The sweater sat finished and blocked in my knitting basket all summer waiting for buttonholes and buttons. In the end I finally procured buttons once the stores opened again. I also eventually worked up the courage to hand-stitch and cut open all the buttonholes. At some point I just thought, it’s now or never - no more deliberating will change the certainty of the outcome.

I think the buttonholes turned out rather well. The aran weight yarn was quite thick, so I separated the plies and did the buttonhole hand-stitch using 2 plies at a time. I believe I would definitely do this again. I have always been a bit of a snob around hand-knit buttonholes and couldn’t take the sloppiness and gapey-ness that comes of trying to knit buttonholes, without reinforcement, into a loose ribbed band. This also allows me to space the buttonholes and position them optimally after the garment is finished and blocked.