A couple months ago I was in a rush to pick a project to bring on a trip, and to have a sweater made for my sister-in-law before her birthday... this rush project just turned out beautiful!
It's labeled as worsted weight, but Ravelry has it listed as Aran, which I think it maybe more accurate. It's 61% cotton and 39% acrylic. I think it's basically a white, knitted, cotton tube stuffed with fluffy acrylic in a mix of colors. Chainette yarn, maybe?
In any case, it knits up into beautiful, uneven stripes that fade into one another. The colorway I chose is Tropical Bloom, but for me it's giving more of a beautiful sunset vibe. Vibrant pink, faded pinky red, soft yellow and lavender.
I actually really enjoyed working with this yarn- it's lightweight, soft, doesn't split easily or look bad when you have to frog stitches. Plus it's machine washable.
Once I realized my yarn was Aran-ish in weight, I opted for the Step-by-step sweater, a free top-down raglan sweater knitting pattern from Handmade by Florence.
For my sister-in-law I knitted up a size D (pattern goes up through a 59" finished bust), although I must have miscounted somewhere along the way because I had a few extra stitches in the body. Not as many as the size up, but more than I was supposed to have. As a result, I think my sweater is a bit bigger than intended. I did give it a quick machine wash on delicate and dried it on high to shrink it up a bit and protect it from future wash disasters.
I didn't exactly follow the neckline instructions- there are options for funnel neck or a neckline that folds over on itself. I did like a one-layer version of the fold-over neckline, with no fold. The neckline is a little wonky, and that's probably my fault.
I couldn't wrap my brain around the German short rows for the neck shaping, even though I've done German short rows before. At least I couldn't wrap my head around it in a way that didn't end up with big holes on the front of the sweater where I turned. So I did the version with no neck shaping.
Otherwise this was a pretty straightforward knit. Perfectly mindless for bringing on a vacation and spacing out.
I think I added a couple extra inches to the sleeves and body because my sister in law is quite tall and prefers a longer sweater.
I used about 2.3 "cakes" of yarn. These cakes are huge! I still have 1.7 left, so you may see more projects with this yarn!
I'm really happy with how it turned out and I think she likes it, too!
