Pacific Cable Progress (and a treatise on my love affair with seamed sweaters)

I've been rocking and rolling on my Pacific Cable sweater lately, after deciding I needed to take a break from the Neibling. I finished the front and got the front and back pinned together, to prep for seaming! Next up is knitting the sleeves, which I have chosen to do long instead of 3/4 length this time.

I am a diehard seamed sweater fan, although that hasn't always been the case. I became a convert after a series of unfortunate, poor fitting knits and with the help of a couple of really wonderful resources in Amy Herzog and Sally Melville.

The Essential Techniques Every Knitter Should Know class on Craftsy is one of the most useful tutorials I have ever had in seaming, picking up stitches, selvages - basically all the things most people don't like about knitting. Sally made those things finally click for me, and her spiel on why seamed sweaters are superior is now my personal hymn as well.

For those of you still singing the top-down in-the-round sweater song, yoke on my friends! My next resource is primarily a seamed sweater tool, but also provides alternative instructions from bottom-up in the round if that's your jam. CustomFit is a tool that generates a sweater pattern for you with custom stitch counts, shaping, and even patterning based on inputs such as your personal measurements, gauge from your preferred yarn/needle combo, and style inputs like pullover vs. cardigan, neck style, sleeve style, fit (negative or positive ease), torso length, etc. To date, I have knit 8 CustomFit sweaters and I have been (mostly) happy with every single one of them with only one exception - and that is the one that I did not knit as a seamed sweater. 

Most recent CustomFit sweaters

My very favorite aspect of the CustomFit tool is the ability to take a single generated pattern, and re-knit it over and over with style tweaks. In the photos above, the pattern on the far left and the pattern on the far right are the same pattern! On the left I used a chart of elongated/slipped stiches and cables to create a honeycomb pattern. On the right, I used that pattern to do a garter stitch fade for three different colorways to use up some one-off skeins I had that complimented each other. 

The center pattern, despite being a colorwork sweater, was in fact knit flat and seamed! But I will be able to re-use that pattern for another knit with the same base/stockinette combo if I want (although I may adjust my needle size down one to account for the colorwork pull). Same pattern, very different results!