Introducing My New Favorite Sweater

February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne

This is my new favorite sweater. I love it. I found the pattern on raverly about two months ago and it just me a little while to commit to making it.

I started this sweater just about a month ago and finished up yesterday. I think that is about the fastest that I've ever made a sweater and its mostly because I didn't have to take it out and redo the sleeves twice and the back three times. Each part of this sweater was knit only once! That is a personal best for me.

The thing that helped me the most with this project was to use string or rings to keep the 7 stitch repeat sections separate while knitting the entire sweater and not just until I learned the pattern. I was goofing up the pattern all the way to the end and caught all of them because I could see when I had 6 stitches in a section instead of 7.

I absolutely love the buttons that I found. Since the yarn was on sale, the buttons ended up costing about 1/3rd of the sweater. But they are worth it. I have never seen such lovely buttons and when I saw them I didn't even think of waiting until I could get two JoAnn's coupons and bring my Mom with me so we each could buy one card of buttons with a 40% off coupon. They had to go home with me that day!

I just love the silver etched flowers!

I took Emma with me to buy the yarn. I bribed her. We'd go to Target to buy what she wanted if she'd go with me to buy what I wanted. She should have known better. We looked at yarn for at least 30 minutes (which is pretty good, considering). I went in wanting to buy a light blue yarn for the sweater and left with the beautiful purple.

Emma then had to put up with me debating as we drove to Target and then home. I wanted light blue but the purple is so pretty. The purple has a small percentage of wool but it might be too hot so the light blue cotton yarn might have been better (but there just wasn't enough of the light blue). And so on. The waffling was over once I cast on. I love the color. The first two pictures are closest to the true color, which is a beautiful dark purple.

My next project will be light blue.

Emma also had to put up with me telling her about 'everyone' making this sweater. She, of course, questioned me about this. Not everyone is making the sweater. She wasn't making the sweater. Grammy wasn't making the sweater. At least the lesson about jumping off the Empire State Building has sunk into her thinking pretty well. But that doesn't detract from the fact that everyone is making this sweater.

I made the XS size because the sizing seemed to run a little large and when looking at the finished projects on ravelry, I liked the sweaters that didn't drape and didn't look like a sweater from the 80's. Again, this was another reason for not having to start over. I'm really liking ravelry, even if all I do is just look at how others used the pattern to know how I want to make it. It saves a lot of time.

The only alteration I made to the pattern was that I spaced the buttons about 2 inches apart so that the three button holes are in the yoke.

I want to make a summer version using a light cotton yarn.

Of course, I shall be wearing this on Thanksgiving day to give it a proper viewing. And it will be worn over to the Roberts' household on Friday as well.

Sweater, n.: garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.
~ Ambrose Bierce from quotegarden.com