After finishing the replacement pants, I needed something to wear with it. Since it’s not generally summer anymore, I figured that if I wanted to continue to wear it, I’d need some sort of sweater. So I hatched an abbreviated plan…
The plan involved making a sweater that was shorter than all my other sweaters. One that wouldn’t bunch under my dungarees. A secondary purpose would be that I could also wear this sweater with suspenders, hopefully. While suspenders are awesome, sometimes wearing them over clothes is difficult because the item is too long. Then you get a lot of bunching and other less flattering situations. So I bought some nice and thick white yarn, and located an interesting pattern on Ravelry.
I settled on the 157-29 Virginia by DROPS design, and then heavily modified it. My gauge was off and I knew that I have no love for the enormously long armholes that DROPS seems to have, so I recalculated everything from the neckline down. I did keep the A.1 pattern intact as the raglan because that was the defining feature of this sweater and why I chose it in the first place. Once I reached the point where I needed to split for the arms, I decided that I wanted to continue some form of the A.1 pattern in the sleeves as well as the body. In the end I made sure to have two instead of three columns in the body and one in the sleeves.
The sleeves were the first to be completed as I wanted to make sure I had enough yarn to finish them. Then I continues with the body, in contrast to the pattern I only decreased a little but not increased. Then it came time to start the hem and I remembered a frogged project that had a split hem. So I put on a pair of my favourite suspender-requiring pants and determined where the splits were supposed to be. Two in the front and one in center back. By some miracle I managed to have numbers of stitches for all three of the sections that allowed me to do 2×2 rib with 3 stitches of knit at both ends.
I’m very happy with the way this turned out. I’ve worn it with both the red pants and suspender pants and it does the job I want it to do. It’s so nice and cozy and warm. Even if it is white and I did manage to pull a thread by getting stuck on something in my house at one point (luckily that was easily fixed). I haven’t yet managed to get spaghetti sauce or something else horribly staining on it yet, so that’s an achievement!