Knitting a Homespun Woolly Jumper

Since I have a mountain of coloured wool that was given to me, I thought it was about time I started knitting more than socks with it.  My self-taught spinning has reached a point where I'm a lot more satisfied with the evenness of my thread, although it's still not to a stage where I'd enter it in the A&P show.

I decided that Hubby needed a nice warm jersey.  He gets a bit snobby about handknit jerseys and would never consider one for "nice going out" wear, they're for home use only, but I can live with that.  There's no way he'd wear one in white or the silvery grey that I've got, so it had to be the dark brown.  I was quite curious to see how the colour would come out once it had been spun and knitted.  There is a mix of greys in with the brown and the gold coloured ends were intriguing.

The fleece before carding and spinning.

We had several discussions about how thick and heavy he wanted it.  I made the choice to make a 3-ply yarn for it.  Now when I say 3-ply, I'm not talking about anything close to commercial 3-ply.  A single of my spinning is probably similar in size to that.  I mean three of my singles plied together.  It's come out something similar to a commercial triple-knit or 12+ply.

A ball of my triple ply homespun.

The next issue I run into is seams.  I hate sewing seams on my knitting.  I have a fear that regardless of how well I pin it or mark it (unless there are stripes to match), I'll end up with puckers and stretching and uneven seams.  I also have a thing about measuring each side right.  Because just smoothing out a piece can change it's measurements, I'm rather paranoid that my sides won't truly match without a creatively uneven seam.

So this time, I chose to knit an entire jumper circular.  This took out any chance of uneven pieces and messy seams.  The only seams are at the top of the shoulders because there was no avoiding that no matter how hard I tried to come up with a solution.  I even knitted the sleeves circular.  I picked up stitches along the armholes and reduced down the length of the sleeve finishing with the wristband, rather than the other way around as is usually done.

At times, especially as I reduced down to the wristband, the sleeves were extremely challenging.  Having a long circular needle meant I had to get creative with where I pulled the excess and still be able to knit effectively.  Towards the end, I was needing to adjust it every 5 or 6 stitches, but it worked and worked well.

A sleeve almost at the wristband.

I used threads of different colours to mark the start point and halfway (or the other side).  Those threads continued down the sleeves to mark where I was reducing.

One of my markers.

Knitting an entire men's jersey this way certainly raised some interesting challenges, but I'd do it again, overall I found it far easier to do and work with.

I didn't work to a pattern as such.  I measured up his favourite but battered sweatshirt and worked to it's measurements.  I had to redo the sleeves as they ended up far too baggy and too long as this seems to be wider at the shoulder than his sweatshirt although both seem to have the same straight drop shoulder cut.