A month ago – the last time I posted, actually – I had a very common thought for someone living in Cleveland in May. “I’m cold.”
This was rapidly followed by a second thought, one which is a very common thought for a knitter. “I’m cold, so I should knit myself a sweater.”
Really, it’s a knitter’s thing.
So, I started a sweater. The sweater is Rift by Jared Flood. I had eyed it for awhile – I can’t really say why, just something about the simplicity and then the very tiniest amount of interesting detail caught my eye. It’s totally plain, totally dull, except it’s not. It’s got just enough stuff to keep a knitter interested. I wanted something that wouldn’t take forever but that wouldn’t take all of my brainpower to create. I also wanted to start a sweater at this point because I’ve had a big realization over the last 2 winters. None of my old handknit sweaters fit me well any more. Well, not none of them – I still have this gorgeous one that I made a decade ago:
That one still fits along with a few others. But the truth is, after 2 babies, my body is definitely different. I knew that would happen, of course, and I’ve been a lot more active in the last few years than I was even before kids – swimming and just recently jogging and a few other things. I’ve been holding off on knitting more sweaters because I want to feel like…well, I suppose, like my body is mostly done changing. Which, I know, it never will be until I hit my last day, but I’d like to not make a whole bunch of sweaters only to have it change and be left with more garments that don’t fit. I actually really want to re-knit some of the sweaters that don’t fit anymore. Either it was a pattern I loved or yarn I adored or some combination of the two, and I just don’t want to let go. So even though I’ve started a few sweaters over the last year, none of them went much beyond the ribbing.
But that day in May, I was simultaneously trying to wear two handknits that were too small. I had finished a pair of socks and realized that the foot was just too short and the toes were too narrow. I had used a different pattern from usual that had not allowed me to try on the socks as much as I usually would, and in the end, they came out too short. I could feel me wanting to take them off and turn this just-now-finished-object back into a work-in-progress. That’s fine, better to have them fit than not fit and hate them…but at the same moment, I was wearing the first ever sweater I knitted.
It’s always been a good sweater – very serviceable, and I love it even though it’s made from acrylic (Caron Simply Soft) and has never fit perfectly. It was only the second item I ever knitted, and my mother and I tried to get the measurements down, but it was tricky. You knit side-to-side to create the body, and we just didn’t make it long enough to really reach my waist. So even when it was completed, I remembered layering a tank top under it to cover my belly button. Now it is far, far too small. It covers my bosom, and that’s about it – it looks like a handknit belly shirt. I love the sweater still – it’s warm and cozy and makes me happy, but I don’t think I want to wear it outside of my house again. And that, combined with the too small socks, made me sad.
I miss sweaters. I miss having sweaters that fit and are special because I made them. I really want one that makes me feel good. So I did a test swatch and gauged for Rift. I found out pretty quickly that the yarn I had selected from my stash might be listed as DK on Ravelry but in practice was far closer to a sport weight yarn. The original pattern calls for Worsted. This should be fun…I tried a few different needles on my swatch, dunked it in water and let it dry, and settled on the size 5 needles. Then I did the tubular cast-on (definitely neat and tidy) and was off and running. For a little more than a week, I knit and knit and knit. Then, I decided to try it on. I want this sweater to be loose, relaxed, and casual – the sweater I automatically reach for when it’s chilly or I’m not feeling well. I have this hideous sweater that I got at some thrift store ages ago that is my go-to sweater when I need one. It’s a deeply unattractive colour, feels like some sort of cotton blend, is impossible to shrink in the wash, and now has a giant hole under one arm. And yet, it’s my go to. (This madness has to stop.) Which meant that this sweater had to be awesome enough to always trump that substandard sweater, and that meant the fit had to be perfect. So I threaded some yarn through the live stitches, popped it off the needles, and tried it on.
You can see the problem straightaway. The bottom ribbing is just choking the rest of the sweater. I know that it’s because I’m using a much lighter yarn than the pattern calls for. It suggested going down several needle sizes in order to get a nice ribbing. But when you’re going down from a 7 to a 3, that’s vastly different than when you’re going down from a 5 to a 2. When I put it on, the whole garment hugged my still curved belly. It took me some rearranging to see how the rest of it was fitting and how it would look, once the ribbing was looser. And while the body of it fit perfectly, it also fit with almost 0 inches of ease. And what I was looking for was ease – relaxed, casual, loose. So I think I’m going to rip the whole thing back and bump up one more size to a 47″ sweater.
It’s funny – in my earlier knitter days, I might have just kept going and thought, “Oh well, it’ll all turn out fine in the end.” But I’ve been doing this long enough now to know when to stop, to try something on, to think it over for a few days before making any sort of decision. And I definitely know more than to blindly trust the gauge swatch (swatches lie) or the pattern (patterns are guidelines, not facts).
At least, in this instance, I trusted that instinct.
And yes, today it might have been 90 degrees in Cleveland, and yes, I might have the central air going right now…but someday, sooner than we would like to admit, winter will return to The Cle. When it does, I’ll be ready for it.
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