I do way more crochet then I do knitting. Until recently the largest thing I knit was a hat, but one of my goals for 2019 was to learn some more knitting skills and to knit myself a sweater! I looked for an easy pattern that used chunky yarn that would work up quickly for my first sweater and chose the Ski Lodge Pullover by ErinBethCrochet. I was so excited to start my first sweater and was so proud that I managed to get all the yarn I needed for it at Dollerama! So my sweater making journey began.
This is a bottom up sweater and technically a crop sweater, but based on the size chart the size small would be a perfect length for little ol' me! I did my gauage swatch ,which I don't usually do to be honest (im lazy haha), but I wanted my first knit sweater to be perfect.
I made my sleeves first (no sleeve island for me!) then moved onto the body. It was taking me longer to knit then I anticipated, but I am not the most proficient knitter so I didn't think anything of it. The sweater became heavier and heavier as I knit, still not thinking anything was amise I kept going.
After 3 weeks I was finally done and I was so excited to try on my new sweater (I even immediately weaved in my ends before trying it on I was so excited-who am I ?!?!) I put my new knit sweater on that I put so much effort into and my BF burst out laughing...it was HUGE I mean huge, especially the arms. The body I could deal with as I like a nice cozy over sized sweater to wear with leggings, but as you can see from the picture above (left sleeve) the sleeves were unwearable. To put it into perspective the sweater was way to big even for my 6'3 BF. I was devastated to say the least.
I am someone who puts everything into whatever I do. Literally if I do something and it does not turn out I do not just feel like I failed at whatever I was making I feel like I failed at life. As I am standing there in my ogre sized sweater my bf said "you should make a blog post about this. I think people will appreciate the honesty. Not everything works out" and so here I am haha He actually googled and found a way for me to shorten the sleeves (right sleeve pictured above). I could just have easily fixed both sleeves and posted "look at the wonderful knit sweater I made" and none of you would have been the wiser, but I chose not to.
Do I have any idea WTF I did wrong...nope. I checked my gauge before starting, I followed the directions exactly, I did my best to keep my tension even, but clearly I screwed up somewhere. Did I learn many new skills (more then anticipated)...absolutely. Also learned I will probably stick to raglan style sweaters going forward and try things on as I go.
I hope you all enjoyed a good laugh at my giant sweater failure and hope this helps someone reading this to realize it's ok if things go wrong, it's how we learn. I had so much fun making this sweater and it did not deter my from wanting to make more.
It is the journey and not the destination-plus nowadays you can always just google directions back to where you wanted to go lol
-KGC
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