This is the first sweater I’ve made since 1990, 30 years ago! So, first step, obviously is a gauge swatch. The sweater is made in the round, so I’ve got to do gauge on a circular needle. I was stumped until I found this article from Purl Soho. It describes a technique created by Elizabeth Zimmerman where you basically treat your gauge swatch like an I-cord, moving the knitting from one end of the needle to the other, leaving a long loop behind. That way, you are knitting every row like you will when you make the sweater.

I used this page to figure out how big to make my swatches. So I cast on 1.5 * 24 (goal number of stitches per inch), which is 36, plus 8 for the garter stitch edging, for a total of 44 stitches. 6 rows of garter at top and bottom.

Swatched with 3 needle, got 6.5 stitches to the inch.
Swatched with 4 needle,… All my swatches came out to the same number of stitches per inch. What was I to do with that???

I have a sweater I was copying in terms of size, so I was shooting for 38” at the underarm and 34” in the middle of the body. I fiddled with the increases and decreases to achieve that, but it turned out to be 32” at the underarm, 34” in the middle of the body. But it worked out to fit fine, but I should have used a #2 needle.

Made the top ribbing and it was too small, so restarted with casting on 156 sts.

For the short rows I knit 78 sts before turning on the right side, 77 on the wrong side, and repeated rows 3 and 4 8 times.

I increased to 220 sts in the increase round by working this:
k7, (m1,k2) 32, k7
which increased by the required 64 stitches. I now was in sync with size 4. I knitted the yoke as written, with 22 repeats. I knitted half the sweater, from the starting point to the half-way point, onto a second circular needle so I could unbunch the stitches and try it for fit. It fit perfectly at this point.

I guess I will continue with size 4 and hope that the sweater keeps fitting.

I had 440 sts after the yoke chart.

When I was done with the yoke, the top solid black line below the elephants was at the armpit. The sweater I am copying in terms of size had the sweater 2.5” below the armpit, so I kept knitting until the side of the knitting was 2.5” below the bottom of the colorwork. (The pattern does not say where to measure from when it says to knit until the yoke measures x inches from the bottom of the neckline ribbing. Clearly that would be very different if measuring from the center back or center front.)

I used the size 4 instructions for the next increase round, going up to 456 sts.

In the row where it says to separate for sleeves and body, the count after each bind off should be decremented by one. So when it says bind of 4, k100, you should bind off 4 and k99 because you have a stitch left from the bind off. If you don’t count that way, the second half of the left sleeve will be 4 stitches short. Why can’t patterns be written correctly????

I followed the size 4 instructions for the sleeve separation section.

This is where it’s apparent I am a complete idiot, although it seems to have had no effect in this case. I knit the sleeves with #3 double points, having knit the body of the sweater with a #4 circular. The good news: I can’t tell except that I started to write up these notes and got confused about what size I used. Doh!

For the sleeves, I decreased on every 10th row, 14 times. Then I did two more consecutive rows with decreases in both, ending with 64 sts. In the round after Sleeve Chart 1 I decreased to 62, and decreased again in the first row of Chart 2, to get to 60 sts. (Chart 1 is a multiple of 4, Chart 2 a multiple of 10.)

For the adjustment round just before the ribbing, I did not decrease.

I used a US 4 needle to bind off the sleeves. The bind off is too tight otherwise.

One downside of my not figuring out gauge correctly was that I ran out of white yarn. I thought I had used two skeins and was looking for a lost third skein, but eventually, in my searching, I found the ball band for the third skein and bought a fourth. I had to alternate rows for a while on both sleeves to accommodate the different dye lot in the new skein, but I can’t see any difference in the color anywhere. (Phew!) In the time that I was searching for the “lost” skein, I knitted the lobster potholder and SHH! scarf that you can see in my projects.

I blocked the sweater using a wet towel and iron as described by Arne & Carlos in one of their YouTube videos. It did a very nice job and was much quicker and probably more effective in flattening out the color work than wetting and pinning.