A Bucket List Knit: Zweig Sweater Pattern Review

This is your reminder that we learn and progress. What was once difficult and seemed unachievable, can become something you are comfortable with. This was the general lesson for me when knitting the Zweig Sweater by Boyland Knitworks.

A number of years ago Nicole of Woolfield Studio made herself a Zweig Sweater (yes another mention of Nicole, she probably won’t be in ALL my blog posts this year). I watched in awe as she made it, as it was my first encounter with both a yoke sweater and with knit lace.

The first time I knit any real lace was for the Fairy Dust Socks (from Nicole of course). The lace was HARD, and I’m pretty sure my face was screwed up in concentration the entire time. I think the hardest part for me though was being worried I’d screw it up and not know how to fix it or even how to tink back. In reality there’s nothing difficult about any single part of knitting lace though. The most important thing you can do to help save you a headache if you do screw up – stitch markers. Luckily it is included in the pattern to place these to indicate your lace repeats. But to actually make these useful, make sure you are regularly counting the number of stitches between every. single. stitch marker. Because I was still concerned about screwing up and then getting discouraged, I counted between stitch markers for every row. And it meant that I never did have a mistake a needed to deal with! A few seconds to count between stitch markers is way better than the time it would take to fix something.

I did really appreciate how the yoke was designed because the increases were kept to a minimum while doing lace, and they were kept out of the colourwork too.

It feels a little like clear sailing once you finish the lace and colourwork, though the little cabled x’s mean that it’s not quite just mindless stockinette for ages. Which means it’s ideal for those who get bored of stockinette quickly! (That is not me though!) The pattern includes a link to a video tutorial for how to do the cables without a cable needle, and this makes it way more pleasant to interrupt your stockinette with cables.

The colours I used to knit my Zweig were not originally intended for this pattern. I thought they would work for a Sipila, but when I did my gauge swatch it became very apparent that there was not nearly enough contrast to actually make the colourwork stand out. So I went back into my Ravelry library, checked projects, and determined that a low contrast Zweig is totally acceptable!

Because the pink is hand-dyed I ended up using all 3 skeins to do helical knitting for the body, and then just 2 for the sleeves. I love that helical knitting really helps you avoid any colour pooling or stripes, but I am not great at switching skeins. When I first tried it on another project, I felt like I had big holes, so I started tightening up the stitches around the switch, but as you can see it’s too tight! It did block out a bit, but is still a little noticeable on the finished object. If you have any tips on getting the tension right when switching skeins let me know!

For my Zweig I found from my gauge swatch that I needed to go up a needle size to 4.0 mm. Of course knitting a fingering weight sweater makes it extra important that you gauge since you don’t want to put that much work into a sweater just to have it not fit. I didn’t do a perfect gauge swatch since I did not block my swatch, but luckily that didn’t end in disaster, and since I was using a yarn that I’d previously used for a garment, which had been blocked, I had at least a little confidence there wouldn’t be a surprise, though I think that I also hadn’t really thought much about a blocked vs unblocked swatch.

One thing that surprised me about the pattern was that there are 2 different ribbing styles used. The collar and bottom hem both use 1×1 rib, so you bet I used my favourite sewn tubular bind off for the hem. The sleeves however, use 2×2 rib which I had never noticed before when seeing pictures. I briefly considered doing them in 1×1, but figured it might look funny and there was a reason the sweater was designed the way it was.

The reason I considered the 1×1 reason was because of the bind off. I didn’t want to have put all the effort into this sweater only to have a plain bind off, that might not fit around my wrists. It took some searching but I did find a tubular bind off for 2×2 ribbing! When you do a search for this technique, most of the videos and tutorials just tell you to switch your last row to 1×1 ribbing, but this didn’t seem like a good option for me. But at last I found it, a real 2×2 ribbing tubular bind off! I also found this other video that has a spoken explanation for the 2×2 and other versions of tubular bind off. The first video has explanations as titles on the video which is helpful as well. Like when I first learned the 1×1 sewn tubular bind off, it seems complicated, and more-so than the 1×1 version. I would also say it doesn’t have quite the same stretch to it, but it does give you a much cleaner edge than a regular bind off.

Since finishing my Zweig in December it has had a fairly steady rotation in my knit sweaters! Especially with the lace in the yoke it’s not very hot, so as long as I’m not somewhere really cold I’ve found it comfortable and easy to wear!