Knitted stripy sweater
This knitting project started with me getting really excited when I stumbled upon the yarn above when cleaning out my storage room.
Not surprisingly, I was immediately drawn towards a nautical theme and decided to knit myself a longsleeved sweater with a raglan yoke. This shape makes for very little assembly, which is always a good thing!
To decide what kind of stripes I wanted, I knitted a couple of swatches playing around with different colours and knit and purl stitches. The swatch on the right is the closest to the final pattern.
I then made a small sketch to illustrate how I wanted the stripes to run up the sweater and the sleeves. Now all I had to do was to get knitting.
Since I recently made another sweater from the same type of yarn, I could use the same basic pattern for the sleeves and the body. I always knit the body first, getting the largest part of the project out of the way while I’m the keenest! In this project, I also needed the body in order to measure with which stripe to start the sleeve – the sleeves are longer than the body, but need to be at the same place in the pattern when I join them for the raglan yoke.
A raglan yoke is when you add the body and sleeves all to one large circular needle, and decrease stitches between the four parts, so that the decreases make a stripe that runs from the armpit up to the neck. I found an old knitting pattern at my mum’s house that told me how often and by how many stitches to decrease for the yoke: For about 15 cm I decreased one stitch on either side of the raglan joints (where the sleeve meets the body) every sixth row, thereafter every fifth row. When I thought the raglan was high enough, I slipped half the stitches onto another circular needle and tried the sweater on. The length was good, so on the next row I knitted two stitches together with five stitches inbetween on the entire row, before I started the k1, p1 ribbed neckline. To give more hold, the neckline is knitted double layer, though all the cuffs are single layer.
