Last night I finished knitting a sweater that I’d been working on for either a while (pictures in this twitter thread) or not all that long, and promptly started the next sweater.

Also last weekend I handed off a bag of undyed (white) knitting to a friend of mine who is way more excited about dying than I am. This includes 13 or 14 pairs of socks (in a few different batches,) and a sweater that I knit. We also found someone who the sweater is more likely to fit than me, and I always quite like finding homes for wayward sweaters.

I have a couple of long flights for work trips coming up so I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t bringing a sweater that I was two-thirds of the way through and would likely finish. The next sweater is the 4th I’ve made from this yarn, and the 3rd plain sweater. I’ve made two plain raglans, and this last one was a crew neck.

By now I have a reasonable set of numbers/patterns for a “fingering weight sweater that basically fits an adult medium/small” that I’ve been honing, and enough yarn stashed to make about 9 of these sweaters. That should get me through the winter.

The crew neck is a touch lower than I think it needed to be, but it looks pretty smart. The thing about knitting Elizabeth Zimmerman-style seamless sweaters is that for the entire time you’re knitting the yoke section it really does not seem like it’s going to work out, so you have low-key panic the entire time, and then somehow, magically it all does. The key to success is to not overthink things too much and not fuck around.

I think this last sweater had a bit too much fucking around with the neckline, so it looks a bit weird (to my somewhat exacting tastes) where the ragland decreases interact with the neck shaping. The front of the neck could have been higher, and I think I could have done like 3-4 sets of short rows near the end to get the right effect for the front. Perhaps one of the next few sweaters can be another attempt at a raglan.

My plan for the next/current sweater is to do set-in sleeves with a crew neck. I have the math all worked out, so that seems like it might be fun. I’ve also never done EZ’s saddle shoulder (or hybrid) yoke, so that seems like some fun winter knitting. Regardless, saddles and set in sleeves are mostly constructed the same way, so I can wait quite a while to make a decision. After about 18 months of mostly knitting socks (and having gotten ~30 pairs done,) a (minor) change seems good.