Yesterday I finally finished my first ever knitted jumper. This project had been on my WIP list for over a year and a half. The pattern was from Wendy. I know the neck doesn't look done, but I finished it roughly due to the overall disappointment of not being able to fit my arms in the sleeves. It is also way too big for me and anyone I know. This is what I ended up producing:

There were many mistakes made along the way that I will detail later, but the best thing for me (and I still don't know if it is correct or not the way I did it) is the colour changes at the bottom. Those triangles were fun and rewarding to knit, here is a pick at the other side:

And the worse part and/or most difficult of all where the sleeves, where I tried to follow the pattern and ended up with two tubes that had no arm shape by any stretch of imagination. Attaching them to the body was no easy task, since I had two very small tubes of fabric compared to the big hole I left in the body of the jumper:

Even though there is one that is better than the other, both sleeves are too slim for an adult person well formed arm (if someone was thin enough to fit the sleeves with their upper arm their forearms would be swimming in yarn, because it has no adequate shape). 

This is the list of all the things that went wrong with the jumper creation process:

• I bought too much yarn for the project, it turns out translating from the size you think you are going to knit to how much yarn you actually need is not an straight forward task. And that bearing in mind that I knitted it too big, I still have 3 x 100g skeins left.
• I didn't measure correctly, even though I did my swatch and washed it and measured after wash, the jumper still came up way too big. I am still unsure on how to do this better.
• Following the pattern blindly, you are supposed to follow the pattern when you are newbie so I did, however when I felt that the sleeves were not going to have the right size/shape I should have gone with instinct, rather than follow the pattern. 
  • Sleeves need to be wider at the top, or else they don't fit well my arms.
• Not following the pattern when I should, I decided to knit in the round making an interpretation of the pattern to avoid seams, when maybe following the actual patter would have yielded better results.
• Colour work ended up narrower than single colour work, I am still not sure what I did wrong there, maybe not leaving long enough strand length behind the colour work. The jumper is noticeably narrower around the colour work even though stitch count is the same. Maybe I should have reduced number stitches when I got to the single colour part, I definitely should have.
• Neck too big. The neck ended up looking to big that I didn't even bother finishing it, I did a lousy cast off and was done with it. I have to practice picking up stitches for necks to look neat, that was not my best skill when I tried.

Having said all that I am very happy I finished it, at least now I know what skills I need to learn to improve my work further. And I should stay clear from wearable knitted patters  beyond scarfs or hats for a while.