Tag Archives: sweaters

Sunday Picnic Sweater

This is the simplest sweater I’ve knitted. It’s also the third sweater I’ve knitted, and the only one I haven’t unravelled. The pattern is by Angeline Webb on Ravelry. I used KnitPicks Wool of the Andes worsted yarn in Peacoat for the sleeves and back, and an undyed skein my mother gave me for my birthday last year.

This sweater is knit flat, even the sleeves, and then seamed together after being blocked. The first two sweaters I tried were knit in the round. One had cables, and the other had colour work. I think I have this problem where I try too much too quickly, because I get overexcited and forget that I’m still relatively new at knitting. Now I’m a little more experienced, but when I made my first sweater I could definitely have used more practice before attempting intermediate techniques.

Lily wearing the Sunday Picnic Sweater

One of the things I love about knitting is that even if you make hundreds of mistakes, all is not lost. You can reuse yarn for new projects, backtrack to fix dropped stitches or wrong stitches. And even if you don’t catch a mistake until you’ve washed your project, woven in the ends, and folded it away into your closet, it’s okay. The point of any hand-made thing is to be perfect because it was made by you, not because it’s free of errors.

When I wear hand-knit sweaters I don’t care that I accidentally knitted instead of purled a couple of stitches, and I really doubt anyone else cares either. I remember how it felt when I wore the first sweater I made. It was warm and heavy. It smelled like coffee and vanilla hand lotion and wool wash and my cats’ fur. I was proud of myself. Even though that sweater doesn’t exist anymore and its yarn is going into a new pattern, I don’t think about the mistakes I made more than I think about how excited I was that I had taught myself how to knit.