FO: Willard Pullover

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Can you tell I’m very excited about my first ever sweater? I am so happy with how this turned out! It’s very warm + soft, fits a lot more nicely than I thought it would and I am so sad it’s already too warm in Lisbon to wear it.

A couple of notes on this sweater:

a) The pattern is the Willard Pullover by Hannah Fettig;

b) The yarn is DROPS Lima in Rost (for the fair isle) and Off White for the rest;

c) Measure your upper arm circumference and see if it matches the one in the schematic. I completely failed to do this, and was about halfway through the first sleeve when I realized it would look huge on me. I ended up decreasing 10 stitches, but the end result didn’t look as nice as I would have like. If I were to do this again, I would have kept the same number of stitches but used a smaller needle;

d) Before blocking, the sleeves were fine, but it was really noticeable that they were much tighter than the body, so I blocked them quite aggressively;

e) I skipped 2 or 3 rows of ribbing on the sleeves simply because I like them a bit shorter;

f) I bound off both the sleeves and hemline using Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off. A regular cast-on was too tight on my waist, and it caused the sweater to bunch up and look awful;

g) Markers between decreases cause a slight hole that is very noticeable in light-coloured yarn:

All in all, I’m pretty pleased! The colourwork isn’t perfect and there are teeny tiny bumps everywhere, but I really like it. It’ll be perfect for next Winter. Knitting top down is kind of addictive, and I see a whole lot sweater-knitting in my future.

P.S.: The Ravelry project page is here.

P.P.S.: Simply because I always find this very useful when deciding which size to cast-on and am looking at other projects on Ravelry: I have a 91cm bust circumference (~37 inches), and did the third size on the pattern (104.5 cm = 41 1/4 inches).