Agnes : Finished

I finished knitting the second sleeve of my Agnes sweater about ten days ago and then spent the following week doing the finishing bits.

First off, I sewed the shoulder seams, using mattress stitch and then carefully picked up the stitches around the neckline (more on that in a bit).  Then came the side seams (I colour matched the yarn as best I could) and, finally, the sleeve seams.  After that, there were ends to be sewn in, then a wash and block (I steam-blocked the pieces before sewing them up just to make the pieces a bit less curly and bouncy).

So,... ta-da!

Here's the front:

And the back:

See how the placement of the blue and green are reversed on the back?

More on the neckline now:

Oops - it's a bit off-centre!

Can you see those decreases on the slope of the neckline?  Genius!  They're double decreases, but instead of doing SK2PO, K3tog, SSSK or similar, usual ways of decreasing two stitches at the same time, two stitches are slipped onto a cable needle (or a double-pointed needle if you can't remember where you've put your cable needles) then those two stitches are held at either the back or front of the work (depending on which way you want the decreases to lean) and then the first stitch on the left needle is knitted together with the first stitch on the cable needle and then the same is done with the next stitch on the left needle and the second stitch on the cable needle (I hope that makes sense).  It's such a nice little design touch.  In addition - and it might not be so easily visible because of the dark blue - the first few rounds of the neckline after the stitches are picked up are worked in garter stitch before doing five (or in my case, because I mis-counted, six) rounds of stocking stitch so the neckband rolls back onto the garter stitch.

It's the little things like that which is why I like Brooklyn Tweed designs so much, as well as the style of the designs themselves.

There were a couple of minor modifications I made to the pattern.  The first was to knit the sweater with less ease than the pattern called for as I wanted it to be relaxed, but not baggy.  I also added ten rows to the length of the pattern because I prefer sweaters to fall a few inches below my hipbones.

Can you tell I'm really pleased with this sweater?

It wasn't that costly to make either as I used Drops Fabel (sold as sock yarn) which is very reasonably priced anyway, but was on sale at Wool Warehouse.  I still need to weigh the sweater to work out how much yarn it took, but I'm fairly certain the yarn used cost no more than £15 (probably a bit less).

I was going to cast on something new yesterday, but I couldn't find the needles I wanted and then remembered they were in something I started months and months ago and then put to one side when, in truth, there's probably only another couple of hours of knitting left to do on it, so I've retrieved it and will try to get that finished today or tomorrow and then I'll show it to you.