Pattern Review: No Frills Sweater
Last Christmas Eve, as in December 24, 2018 (doesn’t that sound like forever ago!?), I cast on Petite Knit’s No Frills Sweater as part of a KAL. I had been seeing a lot of this sweater on Instagram, and I loved almost every single one I saw. Aside from test knits, (which I often have the advantage of seeing made), this is the main way I choose patterns I want to make. I have to see them a lot, and they have to look good to me almost every single time.
One of my favourite versions was Twill & Print’s colour blocked version. So when I was at Fibre Shindig that previous fall, I was looking out for colours I might like to combine for this sweater. I found them at Louise, The Wool Baron’s booth – a purple-y grey (chouette) and the most perfect purple (plume) ever! As you can see of course, I did not make a colour blocked No Frills Sweater. As I started knitting, I found that I was completely in love with chouette, and could’t fathom changing colours, no matter how beautiful the purple is. To my very great fortune, Louise had 1 more skein from my dye lot, and with another fibre event coming up, she did another batch of chouette so I could have enough for my entire sweater!
I quickly found working with the mohair & sock yarn quite addicting. Though also quickly learned, from my gauge swatch, that you do NOT want to frog mohair. Because I of course was quite tempted by multiple pattern tests, I couldn’t exclusively work on this sweater, and definitely did not finish it within the time frame for the KAL. And I tried to make it be a 1 year exactly sweater, but I missed by 2 days. Oh well.
Now, the pattern itself. It is a very basic pattern in terms of what instructions you are provided with. If I had not already made another raglan sweater I think the lack of explicit instructions may have prevented me from continuing with this pattern. And of course there are many different ways to do raglan increases, and this particular way was different from my previous experience.
Once you get past the increases, it is a lot of stockinette and you don’t even need to count your rows since you’re going by length. So I found the body a pleasant, simple, task.
It is very important to do the ribbing in the smaller needle size, as suggested. However, when binding off, I would suggest either going back up to the larger needle, or taking the time to do a tubular bind off. I did a regular bind off, with the smaller needle, and I find the bottom quite tight.
For the sleeves I certainly do recommend keeping track of your rows, I like tick marks on paper and used groups of 6 to keep track of the sleeve decreases. There were 2 changes I made with the sleeves. The first was that I changed one of the sleeve decreases from k2tbl to an ssk. For me it was less noticeable and cleaner looking this way. The second change I made was with the bind off. I actually hadn’t tried on the body (I don’t recommend what I did here, it could result in a lot of disappointment when you reach the end), so I didn’t know the bind off there was too tight. But because in the considerable time between finishing the body and finishing my first sleeve I had made a large portion of my Autumn League Pullover, which specifically calls for a tubular bind off, and made my Silver Bell Sweater which has snug sleeves for the balloon effect, I decided I would be happiest, and it would be safest, to go ahead and do the sewn tubular bind off. It was a good decision.
So my main recommendations if you want to make your own No Frills Sweater are:
- have experience with raglan sweaters already
- try it on regularly (after splitting for the sleeves, before starting the bottom ribbing, and after binding off)
- use the tubular bind off (I learned from this tutorial for a sewn tubular bind off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNbanlVzbxw )
