So Faded Sweater Pattern Review
I spent A LOT of time choosing yarn for this sweater. I’ve been wanting to make it for years, but I also didn’t want to buy a fade kit to make it – I felt like that was cheating. So making this sweater wasn’t going to be just a demonstration of knitting, but of my ability to put together yarns.
And even though the colours in Andrea Mowry’s sample of the So Faded were quite different, I really wanted to get more of a gradient effect in my sweater.
My first attempt was ordering from the now non-existent We Love Knitting. But it turned out 1 of the 3 was too different, too drastic of a change in base colour for all of them to work together.
The 2nd attempt actually got me 2/3 again. The 3rd and final colour once again didn’t work well enough, this time the colourway wasn’t speckled enough. But these yarns from Yarn Ink (one of my favourite dyers – and local to me!), much more neutral than the first attempt, were almost perfect, especially because they were from Yarn Ink. And thanks to a Disney club yarn from her, I was able to complete my fade by chance!
When I finally cast on this sweater I screwed up immediately. I got too cocky and didn’t read carefully enough, but then realized those reverse stockinette shoulders weren’t appearing… So I had to decide whether to go with an all stockinette version, or frog. Obviously an all stockinette version would be just as nice. But I realized if I’d been wanting to knit this sweater for so long, I should probably knit the actual sweater in the pattern.
Once I’d gone back to knit it correctly, things started flying! Being able to just knit is so nice. I just had to be sure to not get carried away and go too far when I needed to be fading in my next colourway! Having the body of a sweater sectioned into 3 difference colours also seemed to make it go faster, since instead of having a whole body or whole sleeve to knit, you just have a few inches, then on to the next!
There was always a chance that the fade I thought I’d planned so perfectly wouldn’t work out the way I’d envisioned, once the yarn was caked and being knit up. And I would say that how well the fade worked differed between my first and second, and then between the second and third colourways. And by chance, I like the fade more on the back than the front, though I think the sleeves both worked out quite well.
I did make a few minor changes to the pattern for the ribbing and the sleeves. After knitting my No Frills sweater, and learning about the tubular bind off between doing the body and the sleeves, I have since tried to use it as much as possible. But as I still haven’t found a way to do it on 2×2 ribbing, I decided to go with 1×1 ribbing for the hem and sleeve cuffs. The Tubular bind off just looks so good, and is way stretchier than a regular bind off, which is my complaint with the body of my No Frills sweater. I really liked the look of the 2×2 rib at the collar though, and since stretchiness isn’t much of a concern there, I decided to go with it – that’s the beauty of knitting, really you can do whatever you want!
The other change I made was to do fewer decreases in the sleeves. Three times I skipped doing a decrease, so I ended up with 50 stitches instead of 44. This turned out to be a really important change. Even with the tubular bind off and blocking, I think the wrist would have been too tight with any fewer stitches.
I probably could’ve gotten away with not blocking this sweater, but to make the stitches look a little more even, I did block it, but didn’t feel the need to pin it. Especially since the superwash merino seemed to stretch a little bit and it certainly didn’t need to be aggressively blocked to fit me. After blocking I would say it got even more comfortable and fit a little better.
This was such a relaxing and fun knit. I don’t know if I’ll ever make another one, but with an infinite number of fade options, you definitely could have multiple of these in your wardrobe!
