Completed Briony Pullover

The last post I wrote was about completing the body, so today I'm telling you all about the sleeves and my final thoughts on the project.

After the body was done I was really eager to get the sleeves completed and get this project finished, so it didn't take me long to get started on them. I was a bit nervous about picking up stitches from the body, but after a couple of attempts I managed to get it looking okay and I knew when I wove in the ends I could probably sort any holes I'd accidentally left anyway. Picking up the stitches was probably the hardest part of the sleeves, once that was done they were nice and easy to work on.

If you remember my last post you'll know I wasn't convinced I had enough yarn remaining, I had one 50 gram ball left for two sleeves. Once I had done a decent amount of the sleeve I weighed how much yarn I had remaining and it worked out that I would need almost a full 50 gram ball for each sleeve, so I definitely didn't have enough. At this point I paused the project and ordered a couple of extra balls of yarn. Once the additional yarn arrived I compared it to the existing yarn, as it was not from the same dye lot. I was planning to knit the same amount of both sleeves with the original yarn and switch to the new yarn at the same point, to make sure both sleeves would be identical and hopefully hide any slight differences in colour. However, when I compared the new yarn to the existing it looked the same, causing me to decide not to bother with that plan and to just continue with the sleeve I had paused.

I quite enjoyed knitting the sleeves, they didn't require much thought so they were nice to work on whilst doing things like watching TV. When I got to the cuffs and needed to change needles to a smaller size, I decided to use the recommended size rather than continuing using 1mm larger in order to get gauge. This was because I wanted the cuffs to be nice and small anyway, so this seemed like the best approach. It didn't take me very long to get the sleeves done and I was really happy with how they looked.

Once the sleeves were done it was finally time to try the jumper on, I was a little nervous as so far I'd only held it up to myself to check lengths, so I didn't really know if it would fit. It ended up fitting very well and the sleeves were the perfect length. The little hole I mentioned in my last post wasn't noticeable either so I didn't try to sort it. I think the only thing I would change if I were to knit this again is that I would size down my needles more for the ribbing on the body, the same as I did with the sleeves (I'd not done this for the body as I was a bit nervous that it wouldn't fit). However, this is more just personal preference than an issue with the finished project, it does still fit well as it is. I ended up using 7 balls of yarn for the main colour in total (840 metres / 917 yards), the pattern had called for 720 metres for the size I chose. I'm not sure why I needed to use so much more yarn, I think it may be because I didn't have the correct vertical gauge, for future projects I'll bear this in mind and ensure I purchase a bit more than the pattern calls for. Overall I would recommend this pattern, I enjoyed knitting it, even as someone who'd never knit a jumper before and I'm very happy with the finished result.