Venturing Out

I love sock knitting! I always have a sock on the needles. I have lots of sock patterns I can't wait to knit. I have skeins and skeins of sock yarn I can't wait to cast on. But until recently, I hadn't attempted to knit a sweater for probably 15 years. The last sweater I knit that many years ago was stitched up with Red Heart Acrylic Yarn. Uh, I can hardly stand to type that, let alone admit it. At the time I didn't know anything about wool yarn or gauge.

That poor sweater turned out so large and just kept on growing. In fact, it was so bad that I don't think I knit anything for quite some time. A month or so ago, I heard about "The Sweater Workshop" by Jacqueline Fee. This book teaches all the techniques needed to make knit-in-the-round raglan or drop-shoulder sweaters in several different styles. In the first part of the book, you are taught how to knit a sweater sampler. In this sampler you get to practice all of the techniques needed for making the sweaters in the book. Here's my sampler. It's about 2/3 done. I knits up in quite an odd shape, sort of like a leg warmer.

I am learning so much from this sampler. The book has been around since 1983 and is now printed in it's second edition, with more up-to-date pictures and additions. It has given me the confindence I needed to start a new sweater as I posted about a few days ago. I highly recommend this book for anyone who would like to learn some great techniques for sweater knitting.