FO: He's Not an Extra

Yesterday I finished knitting the sweater I was working on for my boyfriend, making it the second sweater of the year. I was hoping to have this done by Valentine's day, but it took me a bit longer than expected.

Engage.

 pattern: He's Not an Extra by Julia Vesper, from the book Knitting It Old School

yarn: Cascade 220, in Ruby and Black

needles: 7s for the body and 5s for the ribbing

raveled: He's Not an Extra

This sweater is loosly based off of Star Trek: The Next Generation's uniforms. As part of it, I ordered a com badge and rank pips to go with it, as well as a TNG phaser.

While I loved the idea of this sweater, its actual execution was a bit "meh" for me. My boyfriend requested extra long sleeves and extra length on the body. That wouldn't have been so bad by itself, but the sweater pattern doesn't have much in the way of decreasing after splitting up the front and back by the armholes so the shoulder seams ended up really slouchy. The sweater just seems too big because of it.

Pew. Pew. Pew.

I made a lot of modifications to this sweater. Some were based on my own preferences but some were due to error in the pattern. I used 1x1 twisted rib for the cuffs and body ribbing instead of the 3x3 that was specified, I continued the fake purl seam stitch all the way up the body instead of stopping after three inches, and I knit the i-cord edging around the neck in one piece instead of two so I didn't have that many ends to weave in afterwards.

We had a lot of fun pretending to engage in phaser fights.

The pattern had the short row shaping for the back reversed so there was more fabric on the shoulder edge than the neck edge. Seems that part was designed as a Romulan uniform, not human. I had to fixed that and then wing the collar because the stitch number that they suggested be picked up was much too small. It was pretty frustrating having to fix these errors in the middle of knitting all that stockinette. Oh well, Brian is very happy with it and that's all that matters.

I updated my knit meter counter and I've already passed two miles this year. That's about 1/3 of what I knit all of last year; I'm on a roll!