It’s finished and doesn’t it look fabulous on my friend Dan!

Pattern : Men’s Sailing Sweater from the Zealana Adventurous Booklet.

Yarn: Zealana Aspire Huron in Cloud Blue

 Things to note:  The pattern has an errata available here. It’s not the easiest process to receive the pattern so if you are having troubles you can message the designer on Ravelry under the username Lanamania.  NOTE  There is a mistake in the errata that has yet to be corrected. Row 13 in the errata should be dismissed altogether. There are also several stitches missing from the key that you might need to look up.

The process of knitting this sweater was kind of a weird one for me. I swatched the stitch pattern flat but the sweater is knit in the round   so my swatch ended up being pretty useless. The body is knit from the bottom up in one piece. This caused the stitch pattern to really tighten in a lot. When I finished the body I ended up having to block it  before moving on because it was looking more like a women’s medium instead of a men’s medium/large.  It did block out to measurements beautifully but once I started blocking as I went I had to continue the process so that all my pieces matched up.

I then knit the upper back, blocked then knit the upper front and blocked. It was a long process but the only way that I could make sure it was perfect. To add to all that I ran out of yarn with over half a sleeve and seaming left to complete. *I ended up using 1.37 more balls than what was called for in the pattern so if you are planning to knit this make sure you have extra yardage* The yarn is a merino/possum blend. While it was nice and soft to knit with I’m not so sure I could wear a garment out of it. When I knit with it the possum hairs seemed to shed from the yarn attacking my eyes.  I obviously can’t say what it was like to wear and it might not shed as much once blocked but I don’t think I’ll be knitting myself anything out of possum in the future.

Christina sent me more yarn and it didn’t take long to finish it after that. I gave it one final block * I swear I have never blocked one piece of knitting more while knitting than this* and it was ready to go.

I was a little concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to get modelled shots before I sent it away. It fit Moose in the shoulders but hung off him from the chest down as well as the arms being too big. It may have been a more flattering pattern on Moose in his size but this one just didn’t do a thing for him. I had the exact same problem when I tried it on my dad.

My next step was to ask Dan if he would model if it did indeed fit.

Thankfully it was a perfect fit for him and I love how these pictures came out. Doesn’t the colour of the sweater makes his eyes pop?

Hopefully Yarn Mountain will be happy when they receive their sample!