Mom's birthday hoodie

June is not the month a person would want to wear wool in my corner of the Earth, but it is the month in which my mother was born and she has shown to appreciate knitwear, so... a sweater she gets! The chilly season isn't that far away.

This is a mix between Karen Templer's Improv, a custom sweater pattern designed for the knitter's personal gauge, and the previously used Top-Down Raglan Sweater Generator from Knittingfool.com to make the math part even easier. Using Improv in tandem rectifies the issue of the former pattern not having any neck shaping, which I have learned is important for the wearer to not feel like they're being choked or suffocated. And distinguishing the back from the front! Otherwise there would be no other way.

...That was a stupid joke. Anyway, as you can see I've free-handed a hood and sewn in a zipper, because front-fastening sweaters and cardigans as layering pieces seem to get more use than pullovers in my immediate circle. And, I knit the whole thing seamlessly in the round, which means your girl steeked for the first time. It wasn't as scary as it seemed, cutting into my knitting. I thought I saw some unraveling at the ends of the crochet chain, but it ended up being secure enough after all. I hand-stitched the zipper with polyester thread, carefully trying to sew between the stitches and not through the individual strands, but at times it was difficult to not split the yarn. I really, really hope the thread doesn't cut through the yarn and ruin my work any time soon, or preferably at all...

Are the yarn and textured stitch pattern familiar? I used the same yarn as my cardigan from last winter, 1120.5 yards of Simply Wool Worsted in Wordsworth (from KnitPicks/WeCrochet, whose cheap yarn will no longer entice me because of their attempt to profit off Pride Month without alienating homophobes and transphobes. I was already "meh" about their products so this seals the deal), and I stole the Irish moss stitch pattern for some visual interest on the underside of the sleeves, the sides of the bodice, and the zipper band at the front. My mother used to have a hooded sweater from Armani that had a cool seed stitch detail; I wanted to emulate that look (and also replace her moth-eaten sweater altogether).

I think I'm really getting the hang of this knitting thing, to the point where I'm starting to see what I like to knit and what I don't. A sweater like this, I have decided, is firmly in the "don't" category, as pleased as I may be with it.

The most obvious sign that this was a painful slog of a knit: the fact that it took about six months, on-and-off. (Yes, I have been planning my mother's birthday gift for that long). There's a labor strategy where you break up tasks into discrete elements, which helps you progress faster because it's supposedly easier on your brain. So a seamless sweater, knit in-the-round, in mind-numbingly plain stockinette is categorically not that because it's like you're doing it all at once. Theoretically it is less work overall (no sewing, no seams), but mentally... 

Can you see that column of right-side purl/wrong-side knit stitches? I was going to use it as a basting seam. That's how dedicated I was to making seamless construction work.

It's the difference between filling a eight pints with water, drop by drop versus filling one gallon at the same rate. The same thing is happening but you can more obviously see the progress in the former than the latter and that's why it feels better. (Remember that I finished knitting a cable cardigan, separated into four pieces, in about two weeks). In the past, I've talked about how I might avoid seamless sweaters going forward. This was the project that sealed it for me; if there's no colorwork, no textured stitch pattern, then seamless is out. Also, juggling the weight of a whole sweater on your needles? Nope, not gonna do it anymore. At this point I'm just regurgitating stuff I've already said but dammit, it bears repeating because that's how you learn!!

Update: Mom modeling her present!