I pretty much followed the pattern exactly. I did start the sleeve decreases about 1.5” further down on the arm (well, up the arm, since you are starting at the cuff…) and did 6 rounds instead of 5 between decreases.

Rather than do the crochet edging (I didn’t like the way you could see where I attached the edging - it sort of looked like blanket stitch), I did a 2-stitch attached i-cord with a yarn-over to hide the grey edge. Excellent instructions can be viewed here.

I was excited to try my first steek. It was no problem at all. I stitched and cut my swatch as a little practice try. On my practice try, I only stitched one line of machine stitching (as suggested in this tutorial), and I absolutely could not pull the line of stitching out of the knitted fabric once I had cut the steek - it was very secure. Despite knowing this, I stitched 2 lines of machine stitching on the actual garment - I guess I chickened out a bit. Next time I would just do the one row.

A good hint for the steeking: knit the 2 colours together on the purl (steek) stitch so that everything gets stitched in nicely on the machine (no long contrast-colour floats just hanging there). Also, this makes it easier to see your steek stitch when you are sewing, as it will not be obscured by the contrast-colour floats.

Here’s how I did my buttonholes with the i-cord edge: Usually when I do an attached i-cord edge with incorporated buttonholes, I knit attached i-cord to the place that I want the buttonhole, then knit a few rows of i-cord without attaching it, then re-attach and continue. I didn’t want to do this on this project since my i-cord is a contrasting colour. I thought it would just look like the i-cord was falling off the edge of the sweater on the places where I put the buttonholes. Plus, with the steek, I was not dealing with a nice selvege edge. I didn’t like the way the cut edge looked where I did not attach the i-cord. To remedy this, I slip-stitch crocheted about 4 stitches in each of the places where i wanted a buttonhole, then did my attached i-cord with incorporated buttonholes in my usual way. This cleaned up my raw edge nicely on the places where there were buttonholes.

I found this yarn to be easy to work with. It is quite scratchy (as expected), even after 2 washings with Kookaburra Woolwash. The knitted fabric is light as a feather, but nice and warm. As others have found, I used much less yarn than called for. My size called for 5 wheels of Lopi in the main colour (1500 m), but I used only 2.2 wheels (660 m). I’m glad I only bought 3 wheels!