Sweater weather

I’ve been crocheting for 15 years and I’ve never made myself a sweater. Until now. I dig into the nitty gritty of working on a crocheted garment and what I’ve learned from the process.

Content Warning: I talk about weight and weight loss briefly in this post.

I’ve avoided sweater making for a few reasons

I can’t match gauge. I dunno why. I’ve tried to get my gauge fixed off and on for years with very little headway. I crochet big. It’s my “more is more” gift. I’m so relaxed I make giant-ass stitches, I guess. For a long time, I assumed I was just being sloppy with my work but as I’ve practiced over the years to tighten it up, it’s still just big. So not being able to match gauge makes making a sweater a problem. Because if you can’t match gauge, you can’t size properly and you can’t know how much yarn you need. Those issues makes making a sweater that will fit pretty much impossible.

Also, I’m a big person. And that means when I make a sweater, it’s gonna take a lot of yarn. When I’ve gotten partially done with sweater projects in the past and I’ve seen what the weight of the finished piece was going to be, I cashed it in because it was going to be saggy and misshapen due to the weight of the yarn. It also becomes cost prohibitive fairly quickly when you are talking about large quantities of high-quality yarn. (Don’t even get me started on what tariffs are doing to the yarn industry right now.)

What changed?

Remember recently when I tried for a week to find patterns for this yarn?

It’s okay if you don’t remember you can read about in my post Frustrating Yarn Week.

After that week, I was checking some patterns I have on file and ran across one I thought might work to use that giant ball of yarn for. I knew I’d have plenty to make a sweater with and bonus! the pattern looked like it would be fairly easy to size as I worked so I could continually check my progress and correct as needed. AND since the yarn was so frustrating to find a pattern for I decided I didn’t mind working this as a practice piece. If it turned out I couldn’t finish or if it sucked when I did finish I wouldn’t care because the yarn was already on my personal hit list.

Over the past six months I’ve also lost some weight because of some medication I started in March. That helps the quantity of yarn needed situation tremendously. (It feels weird talking about this on my art and making focused blog so I’m going to acknowledge that talking about weight is tricky and can be upsetting for many folks and I’m going to move on.)

These things became sort of the perfect storm to make a sweater.

Construction Deets

I used the pattern “Scrappy Granny Tee” by Emily Marie Davies. And the yarn is a power ball from Yarn Snob in Keith’s Orchid 121. And wild news! I have 165 grams of yarn left so I’ll be able to make something else as well.

Knowing that I suck at matching gauge, I decided to take my measurements and then make one size down from my measurements. My thinking was it would be easier to back up and size up the work than to have to start all the way over and size down. The pattern also called for a foundation single crochet row at the neckline which I went down a millimeter hook size to work.

While I was working on the yoke, the instructions said to work additional rows as needed to have it meet under the arms. I worked three extra rows and then started the body section. But after two rows of the body, I realized it was way too big so I backtracked and took out the three extra rows. After that, I just followed the directions as written for the size. Which lemme tell you, I did not expect it to work! And yet it did and I love it!

Also it’s worth noting that I made this sweater in fifteen days. I worked on it diligently but not at the cost of other activities. I also did a bit of backtracking for sizing so if I shaved off the time I spent doing that, I would have made this sweater in under two weeks.

You wanna see how it looks?

What have I learned?

Making this sweater was a good moment for me to really assess how I make things. I got to look at how this one thing fit my body and that let me see just how much has changed for me physically since March. That was a lot of self awareness packed into the two weeks I was making this sweater.

I got really excited when I got the yoke finished and started down the body because I knew I was home free at that point. Of course we had a car trip that made the last seventeen rows just fly by!

I think learning how to make something to fit a person really makes me appreciate how difficult clothing is and makes me dislike the mass production of garments even more. I liked making this garment. And you know how I get when I like making things.

What are you learning from your work? I’d love to hear about it! Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.