FO- Avast

I think I've made it clear how much I love knitting men's sweaters (well, one man in particular anyway). Endless fields of mindless and comforting stockinette stitch, round and round for miles. It's the only project I can take with me to the movie theater and knit for hours in the dark and not have to worry about a pattern or a dropped stitch.



The Avast was no exception. It had a finicky little cable band at the bottom, stitches were picked up along the long edge of it, and the rest went on and on forever. The actual knitting portion of this only took me a couple weeks, but it did take forever to finish. There was a hem that went around all the edges that had to be sewn up. I ended up not liking the hemmed sleeves, so I ripped them out and did a few inches of ribbing instead. I had to go out and buy a zipper, and then sew the said zipper in. The bottom puckered in too much, so I took out the last row and did a stretchy bind off instead. This helped, but I still would like to try and stretch the bottom out a bit more to make it fit better...the cabled band isn't nearly as horizontally stretchy as the rest of the sweater so it doesn't want to stay stretched out. More blocking should fix the problem.



Now that I'm looking at it, one sleeve seems a bit short. That will get a good medieval blocking as well.



I also want to re-block the collar. It got a bit smooshed and now it's doing a wavy thing. I might tear open the seam and put some of those plastic collar tabs in there to help with the shape.



I made the 44" size, so there is about 2 inches of ease to the garment. I used Valley Yarns Northhamptons- this is my go-to 100% wool workhorse yarn. It wears really nicely, it's reasonably soft and it's fairly inexpensive- it's $5 for 247 yards. I used about 1850 yards total for this. It's a warm, masculine, wearable sweater.