Knitting -- Aran

It took a bunch of googling but I found it. An aran jumper knit in the round. And I completed the project but it took at least a week longer than it should have, besides my losing track and having to unravel and redo some of it. Here it is spread out on my rustic wooden bench on the back porch.

Here's something all of you know but I didn't think I was going to have to say. When you are doing a project, READ THE WHOLE PATTERN FIRST. The one that I was using and on which I am commenting, is a right old mess and if I hadn't read it over five or six times and posted questions to the website, I wouldn't have an Aran sweater today.

The people who posted the pattern know it's a mess, because they have seven or eight questions, one of which led to a correction. Once they realized they needed a correction, they should have reposted the entire pattern. Instead, what they did was insert one line about the correction.

But they just made more problems. They inserted it under the materials and tools section. It tells you, basically, that one of the charts is wrong. It's not a big problem. It's just the chart for the center of the front and back and sleeves, and it's the nexus for every repeat of that chart. (that was sarcasm)

This correction is not with the chart it belongs to. It's two pages away on the print version and I don't know how many screens away. I was too depressed to bother to count.

The correction involves a cable. The pattern has raglan sleeves and usually that means working top down, starting from the middle of the back. You can't do that cable in the middle of the back, if you work top down. Once you read the pattern a few times, you realize it has to be worked bottom up because it tells you to decrease for the raglan shaping. This could have been solved by a simple phrase at the start of the pattern: "bottom-up".

Great, so working bottom up, I'm used to putting the join of the cast-on at an underarm. It solves the problem with that cable. It's also the only way that their statement of the pattern works, since it starts with motif 5 at the underarm. Unless you work it that way, you can't work the correction as stated. 

Unfortunately they had another problem with the correction. It was inserted in 2006. In 2011, somebody else asked a question about it and was told the opposite of what was in the correction. My email to the site got the answer that you could do it either way.

But there was still a problem because the correction was inadequate. The correction wanted you to cable, but it didn't tell you how many stitches or in which direction. The answer was, do it the same as other cables in the same motif. But it's now 2018 and that should have been in the 2006 correction, if the poster knew what they were doing.

Next is another formatting problem. Obviously nobody running the site ever looked at a print preview of the pattern or cared about the result. There are diagrams of how to do the cabling. They are on a separate page from the diagrams of the motifs. In between them is a diagram of the size variations in the sweater. That's just plain bad presentation design. You either have to carry the entire pattern with you (it's 4 pages long) if you're going to travel while working the sweater, or you can have the cable diagrams on your computer screen while you have the printed motif diagrams next to it. So then you have to be next to your computer while you work. My laptop made this easy; YMMV.

The website boasts "We have videos to help you with this." BUZZER. There is no audio on the videos. (I think I complained about this somewhere else but just in case.) Also you can't see everything the videos show because the pause button is IN THE FRIGGING MIDDLE OF THE VIEW. Don't post videos that are useless.

Why did I go through all this grief? The first and most obvious problem was that the smallest size in the pattern was still too big for me! While I like to layer sweaters, four inches of extra chest space is really overkill. The only thing that saved this pattern from the very start, was the fact that m5 at the underarms was easy to adjust and still keep the more interesting parts of the design. It also kept the sleeves from being outrageously puffy.

Aran sweaters have two CATCHES however.  First, all those cables and things pull it in and you need more stitches in your starter rounds so it fits the same as your usual pullover. I used my normal stitch count at the hem and added 10% of that number of stitches in the first round above the hem. Start with that calculation, and then make sure you have enough stitches to fit the pattern into.

Second those extra stitches as well as the cables take more yarn than a plain pullover. My basic pattern uses a total of 13 skeins with leftovers. However, the pattern says you need what turns out to be an equivalent to 13 skeins for the smallest size; it did indeed work out that way.

One more tweak; they wanted you to do some fancy stitching when you join the sleeves to the body. It might be traditional (I wouldn't know) but I wasn't having any of it. So I just bound off the underarms, finished the raglan shaping, then picked up for the sleeves and worked in the round down to the cuffs the same way as I do on other sweaters.

Just like with argyle, Aran patterns have to be worked with obsessive care. I made some mistakes that I caught quickly enough to fix, but others are unavoidable because there's no way to avoid decreasing (or increasing) the sleeves to fit my measurements without futzing up the motifs.

Which is a sign that the designer(s) should have gone back to the drawing board. The site sells yarn-plus-design kits. How many women are going to pay that money when the designer didn't make the pattern adjustable for them?

Aran is another type of knitting that can either be diagrammed or transcribed. As with lace, learning  to read the diagrams lets you see the pattern before you transfer it to fabric.

As long as the pattern is properly written of course.

I stuck this one out because the same site has lots of yummy Nordic designs and if they were as badly written as this one, I wanted to be prepared. The result is as cosy as it looks. I ticked one more off my bucket list of making classic British knits. There's one left but I won't do it until next autumn because I have old projects to clear the decks of. Including one other classic pattern that apparently originated in Germany but is usually associated with Britain.

Keep watching this space. I plan to work this pattern again, top down, so I have a replacement ready. I am famous (with myself at least) for getting indelible stains on some of my favorite clothes. This gorgeous thing will probably be no different.

© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2020 All Rights  Reserved