In our previous episodes, our hero decided to take the plunge and finally knit his first garment – a hooded cardigan. Having chosen the design and the yarn, the Sweater Quest begins in earnest as I cast on the very first stitches!

The Everyone’s Favorite Cardigan pattern is, at its core, a basic raglan sweater pattern. It is knit in parts from the bottom up, then seamed together:

Back

Left Front

Right Front

Sleeves (x2)

The advantage of this construction is that it is easy for the first-time knitter to focus on making the parts, instead of the sweater as a whole. It also makes this project more portable, as you won’t have an entire garment hanging off your needles!

On the other hand, the finished garment will require quite a bit of seaming and assembly (ugh!), and I won’t know how well it fits until the entire project is finished. That makes it even more important to 1) measure yourself carefully and 2) double-check your gauge. For these reasons, it seems like top-down sweater construction is more popular these days in the knitting world.

Here is the back of the sweater:

It starts with 2×2 ribbing designed to hug your body. To make the design “pop”, I did this part in a contrasting yellow yarn – Big Twist Chunky from Jo-Ann. I think it blends well with the main color (indigo). In my English-style days, a rib like this would have taken me quite a while, but Continental knitting lets me switch between knits and purls with a flick of the wrist. Sweet!

From there, the back moves into a even stockinette stitch, then into paired decreases to shape the raglan sleeves/shoulder. I think it turned out well, but there a couple of things I would change. The pattern doesn’t specify what decreases to use, so I used my old standby – knit 2 together (k2tog). However, k2tog is a decrease that leans to the right. A more pleasing effect would have been to use the appropriate decrease for each side – k2tog for the left (right-leaning), and slip, slip, knit (ssk) for the right (left-leaning) side of the fabric. Also, putting decreases at the edge of the fabric made the raglan seam edge look a bit sloppy. In the future, I will move increases and decreases further into the fabric as follows:

Decrease Row:  k1, ssk, k until 3 stitches remain, k2tog, k.

The good news is that the back is by far the largest part of the cardigan. The other pieces go very quickly in comparison!

In our next episode: left front, right front, and pockets – oh my!