The Ugly Christmas Sweater project is now reaching the point where I'm knitting the back, and have reached the arm holes. As the sweater is effectively in two halves, this means I've got to form arm holes that are identical on both sides.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
(that was a slightly manic / insane laugh at the prospect of knitting something that has to match).
After running out of the grey yarn in the photo but thankfully A) being able to remember what make it was (I'm a bloke, we never keep our yarn labels, stupidly) and B) finding three more skeins of it in our local wool shop (the invaluable Masons!) I've got back on track with it.
A few folk have asked about the pattern. I'll be entirely honest here, the pattern is completely random which lends to its ugliness but also shows just how utterly useless I am at following Fair Isle pattern charts. For one section (the 2nd row up from the bottom ribbed hem bit) you can just about make out Manic Miner's walk cycle legs - which I fully intended to include, but then messed up so many times that in the end I reverted to just knitting any old combinations of red and grey. Weirdly it still looks 'festive' even though it doesn't really represent anything but hey, if you can see reindeer, faces or whatever in that pattern, more power to you - you are probably really good at those "Magic Eye" pictures, right?
Shaping the arm holes in preparation for the arms is going to be fun, involving casting off several stitches on each side at the start of each row, before the REAL fun of also trying to shape a neck for this thing. I am sorely tempted to make the neck a polo neck purely because I know I can knit tubes, and think I can almost seamlessly join a tube neck to the top of this beast.
If I had one piece of advice for beginners about knitting sweaters, it would be this. Don't for the love of grud make your first sweater project a fair isle...!
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