I completed my machine knit sweater!  Here are the specs:

Tahkai’s Donegal Tweed in red, about 3.5 skeins
Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns, child sweater, 4 stitches/inch
Knitting machine gauge set at 7

Because I wasn’t ready to deal with the ribber, I made I-cord (a dream on the machine!) for edging.  I tried fake rib, but on the bulky machine it looked weird.  I will attempt to put the ribber into service before my next sweater.

I followed the pattern pretty faithfully, but before the second sleeve it was clear they were too long.  The pattern called for 14" before decreasing for the cap sleeve.  I made it 13" and (note the rolled up sleeves) it was still too long.  I hope that means he’ll wear it longer.

During finishing Peggy noticed that the neck was too small.  So, I put two buttons at the neck and T3’s big head fits just fine now.

All in all it was a good project to get started on the machine.  I did a gauge, I-cord, increases, decreases, and bind-offs.  If I had worked all the way through and not re-done so many pieces I could have easily completed the four pieces in a day.

Much to the surprise of my fellow knitters, Beth and Peggy, I had never sewn a sweater together.  For seven years I’ve always bought patterns that didn’t need finishing or re-wrote the patterns so I didn’t have to put them together.  The most I’d done was three-needle bind-off of shoulders.  So, Peggy showed me how–she even offered to do it for me!–but I persevered.  I’m proud of myself.

Here’s a picture of T2 and T3, each in Donegal sweaters.  T2’s striped sweater is at least two years old.  I just fixed the cuff again (he keeps wearing it out).

Thanks to Beth, Peggy and Susan for getting me through this project–the support and inspiration was much needed.  It’s fun to do something new, but this was a bit too new for me.  Now that I’ve had success, I’ll give the ribber a try and then jump into another sweater (for the DH maybe?).  I know an essay on machine vs. hand knitting is going to come up soon as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 26th, 2007 at 8:33 am and is filed under Completed Items, Knitting machine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.