My first real pullover! I enjoyed knitting this. The pattern repeat is only every four rows, which makes this sweater seem like it’s working up more quickly than something with a pattern repeat of like 70 rows. The diamonds themselves were a 40 row pattern repeat, but the “work pattern, purl a row, knit a row, purl a row, work the pattern…” was fun because there weren’t a ton of boring stockinette rows or anything. I’ve never made a full-length sweater before, but this one didn’t seem to take very long to finish.

The stitch pattern was easy but I rated this medium difficulty because I had a hard time maintaining the continuity of the pattern while increasing for the sleeves. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to add more diamond repeats as the sleeve got wider because the pattern didn’t specify. (I didn’t.) It was also annoying trying to figure out when to begin the lace pattern when there were so many extra stitches at the beginning of the row. Binding off for the neckline in the pattern wasn’t as hard, it just took some logical thinking, like replacing a k2tog with a k2.

I followed the pattern exactly except for the sleeve increases. I guess something was up with my row gauge because by the time I increased to the required number of stitches, my sleeve was like 25” long. So I only increased to 66 stitches instead of 68 and it worked out fine. Although my sleeves are still just the tiniest big too long, in my opinion. But I already had to rip out a sleeve (it was hard to really see how long my sleeve was without the sleeve cap being done) and I didn’t want to do it a second time. Laziness prevails. (They look longer in pictures than they do in real life.)

This was my first time blocking lace and I was nervous about blocking this sweater because I didn’t want the diamonds to get distorted and stretched out of shape. So in the end I blocked the back and the sleeves but not the front. The live stitches along the neck before seaming the shoulders made me nervous and then the low neckline after seaming also made me nervous because I didn’t want to stretch it out of shape. It didn’t seem to make a difference either way; you can’t tell that part of the sweater is blocked and part isn’t.

Total Cost: $23.92