This Gal's Top 3 (Free) Sweater Knitting Resources

I'm sure you've heard it before, “if you can knit a tube and do increases and decreases you can knit a sweater. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Once a knitter wants to move onto knitting a sweater that's the first thing seasoned knitters tell them. The thing with that advice is, most things that worry knitters about their first sweaters isn't the actual knitting part. Their thoughts usually are, “I'm about to spend who knows how long on this sweater, what if it doesn't fit.” It's probably the first time most people are working with gauge, multiple measurements and modifying a pattern to work best for them. A lot of times, it's the first time a knitter is even working with gauge. There's a lot of uncharted waters for a new sweater knitter. Luckily, there are tons of free resources around on the Internet to help us along the way. Here are three of my favorites.

Nina’s Design Your Own Sweater Class on KnitPicks.com - I love this resource because each lesson comes with a PDF fill in the blank worksheet. Whenever I plan out a sweater I feel like I'm forgetting something important and I'll run into roadblocks later down the road. With the print outs, there’s less room for error when I’m planning the numbers needed for my sweater. I'm not going to say there's no room for error, because believe me, sometimes I can overlook things that are right in front of me like I'm getting paid to do it. Lets just say, it's harder to overlook a certain measurement or math formula, since everything is right there and there's less things that I have to remember off hand.



Thinking Beyond the Pattern: Knit Smarter not faster on Knitty.com - Thinking Beyond the Pattern by Jenna Wilson, is an entire series on understanding the knitting pattern and grading any given sweater design. Most of the series is geared towards aspiring designers, but it all can be applied for the casual knitter, too. The article I seem to be reading the most is, 'Knit Smarter Not Faster'. I love it because it puts that advice you always get about reading through the pattern into context. It takes you through what to look for when reading a pattern and even talks about how to use schematics to your advantage. And Jenna gives you helpful tips on what to do if your pattern doesn't have a schematic. I do recommend looking at the entire series, it’s incredibly thorough and has tons of information. The only thing is, for me, it can get pretty heavy and after awhile it becomes information overload. So, I suggest to take it in small chunks.

By Gum By Golly Fit & Knit a 40s Pullover Series - Although this tutorial series is geared towards knitting a specific sweater pattern all the information there can be applied to any sweater pattern, modern or vintage. This is probably my most used online resource when I’m planning to knit a sweater. I'm not sure what it is, but there's something about having someone else walk you through their process that's so helpful. Being able to see an actual sweater in progress as opposed to a schematic helped me grasp some of the concepts that I just couldn't get a handle on. Tasha’s writing is also super easy to follow and isn’t weighed down with too much technical jargon that makes me lose interest.

Those are some of my favorites. What are yours? I'm currently working on a sweater resource masterlist, so let me know in the comments below so we can build a comprehensive list.

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