Jutta has done it again with this beautiful design featuring exquisite detailing across shoulders, at sides, and down each sleeve. The twisted stitches are occasionally brought together with wrapped stitches, resulting in a cascade of loveliness. Note that there are no cables in this design, though I did use a tiny cable needle to speed up the execution of the wrapped stitches. If you’ve never tried wrapped/smocking stitches, this is an excellent pattern to introduce yourself to this very easy and decorative technique. There’s a link to my video below where I demonstrate how easy it is to do this special stitch.

What I did differently:

• I did not work the 4 wrapped stitches before wrapping them even though the pattern says to do this. I found that the decorative work lays flatter and looks better if the underlying stitches are not worked in advance of wrapping them - at least with my yarn. I did the wrapped stitches as shown in my video - link below.

• I bound off all the ribbing (in pattern) using Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off and size 1 US needles. For all other parts of the pullover, I used size 2.5 US needles (3 mm).

• I did the decreasing at the sides a couple stitches away from the decorative panel. I found that doing them as instructed in the pattern left small holes along the panel edges. Perhaps this would have looked nicer in retrospect, but since the decreasing is not done on every round (and with uneven spacing between rounds), I thought it would look more uniform to do the decreasing a couple of stitches away.

• When I got close to the bottom ribbing, I found that I had more stitches in the back than in the front. Therefore, I started decreasing only in the back toward the bottom so that I ended up with an equal amount of stitches for front and back in preparation for the lower ribbing:

107 sts for front and back (each) = 214 sts
10 sts for side panels (each) = 20 sts
234 sts total for ribbing

• The test pattern instructions were unclear to me regarding the number of initial stitches in the underarm part of the sleeves. (This has since been fixed/improved.) So I started with a 16-stitch pattern rather than the intended 10-stitch pattern. So I was pretty much winging it under that arms. Yours will look different than mine. Also, your sleeves will probably not look as fitted as mine. I decreased 5 stitches on the first decrease round of the sleeves which is not what the pattern says to do. When I picked up stitches for the sleeves, I did 2 out of every 3 stitches. If you need more sleeve width, the pattern says to pick up 3 out of every 4 stitches.

• I made another mistake when picking up stitches for the sleeves (besides the mistake on stitch pattern under the arms). I continued the outer decorative stitch pattern on the sleeves exactly as it occurred at neck and shoulder, starting and ending with “P3”. This is not correct. Note that the decorative pattern changes for the top of the sleeves (from where you pick up sleeve stitches) all the way to the wrist. Because of my mistake, I had to add two additional stitches before starting the sleeve cuff ribbing. Actually, I just decreased two stitches less than what the pattern said to do so that I would end up with 50 sts (for the cuff ribbing) and the pattern strip design would not be interrupted. It looks okay the way I did it, but I think it would look even better if you follow the instructions in the pattern!

See my video tutorial here which shows how to do the wrapped stitch (also known as the “smocking stitch”).

Test Knit Forum

Correction Thread