It started that I wanted to knit a cable sweater. Then I decided that my daughter needs a sweater with a hood.

After searching for a while, I decided to go for https://ravel.me/whitney-double-x-hooded-cardigan

As I am not confident with my knitting skills, I decided to start from the back piece. After I finished the ribbing and started a little bit on the cables, I showed it to my mom over FaceTime.

My almost-80-year-old mother spotted that the increases stitches from the ribbing weren’t quite right as the ribbing didn’t continue to the cable pattern and they look “broken”.

After staring at it for a day, I decided to redo and recalculate where I should increase the stitches.

Then I started with the two front panels and decided to make the button bands 2 stitches wider than the pattern so the button holes look better.

Then the sleeves. The pattern calls for decreases on both edge on the right side and I found I couldn’t get the edge smooth on one side. So I decreases on both right and wrong side on the last two stitches of the row using k2tog.

Finally, the hood. By now, I wasn’t sure if I would have enough yarn. I used a new skein for each piece and was out of a new skein. So I decided to make all my loose ends on the seam edge in order to hide them later on, instead of using knots to connect them.

Of course, my mother told me that I could’ve blend the ends together…

Sewing the pieces together was a little more difficult than I expected. There might not always be a 1-to-1 mapping of the stitches and I had to make a little adjustments here and there.

See how the ribbing and the pattern sort of “flow” together?

This sweater took me a little over a month to finish. It was a lot of learning and after a while, cables aren’t that difficult and it became easier to keep track of the different elements.

By the time I finished knitting this sweater, it’s almost Halloween. The colour that my daughter picked made this sweater somehow look like a pumpkin to me. So I am naming it, “Pumpkin”.