Finished Alberta Vest
Happy Vestvember (Observed)! I finished my husband’s new sweater vest on January 19th, and finally got to snag a couple pictures of him wearing it this morning:
Here’s one more picture of him playing with our daughter this morning, who also happened to be sporting a handknit sweater:
Gotta love a well-dressed family!
The pattern is Alberta by Jared Flood, Raveled over here.
The knitting part of this project went pretty smoothly. I used TECHknitter’s tutorial for traveling jogless stripes to get the striping to look nice and neat. The only major gaffe I had was the first armhole–the instructions say to slide 12 stitches onto waste yarn and then to keep knitting on the other side, so that’s what I did. I should have broken the yarn and joined it again on the other side, however. I ended up doing a sort of messy fix involving a knot or two in the armpit area. You can’t tell on the finished sweater, but I was totally sweating the finished product for a while.
The steeking for the neck and armholes was a crazy-stressful yet ultimately exhilarating learning experience for me. I studied Eunny Jang’s steeking chronicles religiously for several days, and made a couple of rows of practice steeks on my gauge swatch to get into the swing of things.
It seems the longest part of this project was picking up all those stitches for the ribbing around the arm and neckholes. I would guess the total area of stitch picking up is 2 to 3 feet of length when it’s all said and done. The designer’s recommended tubular bind off took a long time too, but I felt it was a good learning experience and the extra effort in the finishing department really took things to the next level and made the project look extra special.
This is the video tutorial I found on YouTube that I used to learn the tubular bind off:
It’s by Deb at Beautiful Knitting, and like all of her knitting videos, it was *so* well done–good image and sound quality, just the right pace, and the instructions were very easy to follow. I hope she does a lot more videos in the future.
The last thing I have to say about knitting this pattern isn’t really about the pattern itself so much as the format it’s available in–I found having to go out and track down a paper copy of back issue of a magazine to be a huge pain in the butt, and I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t really, really want to knit this particular pattern. Wild Fibers Magazine is a beautiful magazine, and I didn’t mind buying an issue, but I would have happily paid the same amount of money for the convenience of a PDF download. I noticed I was only the 41st person on Ravelry to knit this pattern; I think a lot more people out there would give it a go if the pattern were available electronically.
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Awesome vest! So vibrant.
January 26th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Hi, Amelia!
Thanks for the link and for the oh-so-wonderfully-kind words! That’s the most rewarding part of making videos. Only difficulty with making more just now is that my beloved teen-genius camera-guy is off at college. I’ll have to figure out how to use one of the 2 tripods to get a good angle on my own hands.
The vest did turn out very nicely. Love the variegated striped with the neutral (black)!