Knitting a (Medium) Man Sweater
5 Dec 2025 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneMedium Man is a large size. It has more fabric in it than Small Woman (the size of me). It doesn't have more fabric than a sweater for waxjism, but she is too warm-blooded to wear sweaters really, so the last time I knitted one for her was over 10 years ago.
It's a lot of knitting. It's going. There are setbacks.
There are gauge issues. And challenges of imagination.
As I've mentioned before, I'm working on the second of the 18th-birthday-present sweaters for the triplets currently.
I'm making the popular Guernsey (a traditional regional fisherman's sweater type from the channel isle, with many notable features but especially repeated texture pattern made by a combination of knit and purl stitches) pattern Storm Sweater (Man) by the popular Danish designer PetiteKnit. (The pattern has a traditional look, but is knit from the top down with a Nordic-style yoke, in contrast to the traditional bottom-up construction of a Guernsey.)
I'm using the same yarn the pattern calls for, Sandnes Garn Peer Gynt, a DK-weight 100% Norwegian wool. I made a textured swatch and blocked it, but I got stitch and row gauge both without even stretching it. But because we didn't get to measure the triplets or any of their favorite garments with measuring tapes and are relying for size on the guidance "Men's size M", there's a bit of uncertainty involved.
The sweater is enormous compared to knitting sweaters for myself obviously, and it's taking way longer than the sweater I made for myself with this yarn last year because it's got like two and a half times as much fabric in it. The sweater is also designed to have a pretty relaxed fit - not baggy and batwinged like a 1990s sweater, but not snug and tailored like a lot of men's sweaters designed in the 2000s and 2010s.
So I finished the sleeve charts according to the pattern, which said to finish all the decreases and then continue until you hit 47cm "or desired length", but when I finished all the decreases the sleeve was well over 50cm. It also was long enough on me to completely cover my hands and I hadn't even started knitting the cuffs, and I have Long Monkey Arms. My hands are the exact same size as my 6'3"/189cm BIL's (I am 5'6.5"/170cm). So I guessed that it's possible the nephews have longer arms than me because they are both taller than me (although neither is 189cm), but probably not a lot longer, and possibly the same length. Definitely not shorter. Wax agreed with this estimate. Anyway, the row gauge is clearly off on this sleeve, regardless of my blocked swatch. It might have been changed because of the smaller circumference of the sleeve?*
Happily, I remembered that all Wax's favorite flannel shirts are actually men's (because there are no mainstream brands that make a women's size large enough to button around her boobs when she's wearing a bra and the widest point of her chest is about 121 cm). It's a men's L! So we laid it flat and put the sweater over it and used that as a sanity check for the sleeve length and width.
When I frogged the sleeve back to the place where we agreed the cuff should start, it was also enormously wide, just... way too wide for a normal cuff in our opinion, even for a man. (Very wide floppy cuffs are trendy for women's knitwear designs in the last few years, but (a) I hate them and (b) I don't think they are trendy for men anyway.) I tried decreasing evenly all around and then starting the ribbing, but it wasn't small enough. So I had to frog the entire sleeve in order to pick up fewer stitches and decrease more evenly along the length of it, which was about 2 and a half days' worth of knitting and more than two skeins - because, again, this sweater is gigantic.
It's a good thing this is patterned all over with knit/purl Guernsey texture stripes that change every 16-20 rows, because that keeps it interesting. I wouldn't be able to keep at it for this long if it was plain stockinette - it's too boring - and it would be just painful if it were a lot of cables.
Wax has been too busy to knit at work so she is making slower progress on the striped triplet sweater (a bumblebee-colored Breton stripe). We haven't started the third one yet, which is planned to be pine green and cabled.
*The traditional way to knit socks and other tubes is on a set of five short double-pointed needles that you arrange into a square, leaving one as a spare, with the stitches around the circumference of the tube divided into quarters. After you knit to the end of one needle with your spare, the needle those stitches were on is free and it becomes the spare needle that you use to knit the next quarter. I don't like using these. I don't like the juggling and switching between needles or the way the stitches at each end of each needle have a tendency to get tugged out of line and becoming bigger than the other stitches, so you have to use various techniques to counteract this. The other method of knitting socks is using a very very long circular needle, that is to say, a long steel cable with a needle at each end. When knitting a tube much smaller than the length of the cable you can pull the excess cable out in two little loops on either side of the knitting. I like this better and I use it for hats all the time, but I don't love it, and it's why I made very few socks until a few years ago, when some genius invented triple needles.
These are a set of three tiny flexible needles for knitting socks on. Essentially, each one of the needles is two short needles connected by a tiny little elbow of flexible cable, the same kind in a circular needle, but just long enough to let the needles fold and bend in any direction, like tiny nunchucks. So one flexible needle substitutes for two double-pointed sock needles, and you keep all the stitches in the tube on just two of them, but held in a diamond or square shape because of the bend in the needle. Switching is much faster than with straight sock needles, too. I love these, and I bought them in the sizes I use most for 4-ply and worsted sock weights. The 4mm are the right size for knitting the sleeves of worsted and DK sweaters, and I've already used them to knit the sleeves of sweaters for me, but I can't use them for this sweater because the sleeves are too big!
They are significantly wider than any sock. They're about half as wide as the body of the Christmas sweater I made myself out of this same yarn last winter. I would've needed one of those hat needles to knit them comfortably, but I didn't think of it. I only have hat needles in 3mm and down because I think those gauges make better hats. (When it's cold a double-layered stocking hat is warmer than a single layer of wool that's twice as thick, because the double layered fingering-weight yarn lets less wind through.)
waxjism, but she is too warm-blooded to wear sweaters really, so the last time I knitted one for her was over 10 years ago.It's a lot of knitting. It's going. There are setbacks.
There are gauge issues. And challenges of imagination.
As I've mentioned before, I'm working on the second of the 18th-birthday-present sweaters for the triplets currently.
I'm making the popular Guernsey (a traditional regional fisherman's sweater type from the channel isle, with many notable features but especially repeated texture pattern made by a combination of knit and purl stitches) pattern Storm Sweater (Man) by the popular Danish designer PetiteKnit. (The pattern has a traditional look, but is knit from the top down with a Nordic-style yoke, in contrast to the traditional bottom-up construction of a Guernsey.)
I'm using the same yarn the pattern calls for, Sandnes Garn Peer Gynt, a DK-weight 100% Norwegian wool. I made a textured swatch and blocked it, but I got stitch and row gauge both without even stretching it. But because we didn't get to measure the triplets or any of their favorite garments with measuring tapes and are relying for size on the guidance "Men's size M", there's a bit of uncertainty involved.
The sweater is enormous compared to knitting sweaters for myself obviously, and it's taking way longer than the sweater I made for myself with this yarn last year because it's got like two and a half times as much fabric in it. The sweater is also designed to have a pretty relaxed fit - not baggy and batwinged like a 1990s sweater, but not snug and tailored like a lot of men's sweaters designed in the 2000s and 2010s.
So I finished the sleeve charts according to the pattern, which said to finish all the decreases and then continue until you hit 47cm "or desired length", but when I finished all the decreases the sleeve was well over 50cm. It also was long enough on me to completely cover my hands and I hadn't even started knitting the cuffs, and I have Long Monkey Arms. My hands are the exact same size as my 6'3"/189cm BIL's (I am 5'6.5"/170cm). So I guessed that it's possible the nephews have longer arms than me because they are both taller than me (although neither is 189cm), but probably not a lot longer, and possibly the same length. Definitely not shorter. Wax agreed with this estimate. Anyway, the row gauge is clearly off on this sleeve, regardless of my blocked swatch. It might have been changed because of the smaller circumference of the sleeve?*
Happily, I remembered that all Wax's favorite flannel shirts are actually men's (because there are no mainstream brands that make a women's size large enough to button around her boobs when she's wearing a bra and the widest point of her chest is about 121 cm). It's a men's L! So we laid it flat and put the sweater over it and used that as a sanity check for the sleeve length and width.
When I frogged the sleeve back to the place where we agreed the cuff should start, it was also enormously wide, just... way too wide for a normal cuff in our opinion, even for a man. (Very wide floppy cuffs are trendy for women's knitwear designs in the last few years, but (a) I hate them and (b) I don't think they are trendy for men anyway.) I tried decreasing evenly all around and then starting the ribbing, but it wasn't small enough. So I had to frog the entire sleeve in order to pick up fewer stitches and decrease more evenly along the length of it, which was about 2 and a half days' worth of knitting and more than two skeins - because, again, this sweater is gigantic.
It's a good thing this is patterned all over with knit/purl Guernsey texture stripes that change every 16-20 rows, because that keeps it interesting. I wouldn't be able to keep at it for this long if it was plain stockinette - it's too boring - and it would be just painful if it were a lot of cables.
Wax has been too busy to knit at work so she is making slower progress on the striped triplet sweater (a bumblebee-colored Breton stripe). We haven't started the third one yet, which is planned to be pine green and cabled.
*The traditional way to knit socks and other tubes is on a set of five short double-pointed needles that you arrange into a square, leaving one as a spare, with the stitches around the circumference of the tube divided into quarters. After you knit to the end of one needle with your spare, the needle those stitches were on is free and it becomes the spare needle that you use to knit the next quarter. I don't like using these. I don't like the juggling and switching between needles or the way the stitches at each end of each needle have a tendency to get tugged out of line and becoming bigger than the other stitches, so you have to use various techniques to counteract this. The other method of knitting socks is using a very very long circular needle, that is to say, a long steel cable with a needle at each end. When knitting a tube much smaller than the length of the cable you can pull the excess cable out in two little loops on either side of the knitting. I like this better and I use it for hats all the time, but I don't love it, and it's why I made very few socks until a few years ago, when some genius invented triple needles.
These are a set of three tiny flexible needles for knitting socks on. Essentially, each one of the needles is two short needles connected by a tiny little elbow of flexible cable, the same kind in a circular needle, but just long enough to let the needles fold and bend in any direction, like tiny nunchucks. So one flexible needle substitutes for two double-pointed sock needles, and you keep all the stitches in the tube on just two of them, but held in a diamond or square shape because of the bend in the needle. Switching is much faster than with straight sock needles, too. I love these, and I bought them in the sizes I use most for 4-ply and worsted sock weights. The 4mm are the right size for knitting the sleeves of worsted and DK sweaters, and I've already used them to knit the sleeves of sweaters for me, but I can't use them for this sweater because the sleeves are too big!
They are significantly wider than any sock. They're about half as wide as the body of the Christmas sweater I made myself out of this same yarn last winter. I would've needed one of those hat needles to knit them comfortably, but I didn't think of it. I only have hat needles in 3mm and down because I think those gauges make better hats. (When it's cold a double-layered stocking hat is warmer than a single layer of wool that's twice as thick, because the double layered fingering-weight yarn lets less wind through.)
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Date: 9 Dec 2025 10:55 am (UTC)There are some Wesley sweater patterns online, but I have never seen a satisfactory Starfleet uniform top as good as I think it could be.
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Date: 9 Dec 2025 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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