Harvey Knits Ama Sweater

I knitted a jumper! the Harvey Knits* Ama sweater. Knit almost entirely during work calls, its the perfect project requiring not too much concentration but giving a really interesting result. I’ve never been so productive knitting wise in my life!

Yarn is Malabrigo Arroyo in in the Pearl (grey) and Fucsia (pink) colourways. The grey has pinkish undertones, which I didn’t realise when buying, so an unexpected bonus. They go perfectly together. I got three skeins of the pink and four of the grey, which wasn’t quite right as we’ll get to below.

For the size I made L. I expected it to be looser than it is, but actually I like it with this amount of ease.

As I mentioned, this is a pretty straightforward pattern, once you have understood the (very clever) string of pearls instruction, it’s all plain sailing. The instructions are clear throughout. I did make a few mistakes - there’s a couple of random holes where I obviously did accidental YOs - you can see the one on the right sleeve in the photos. I will probably end up sewing these together cos they are pretty visible. I also did the K1tbl wrong for most of the yoke section, and I think the eyelets at the sleeve separation line would be less pronounced if I had done it correctly.

One thing I do think was the instructions and not me is that the band of contrast colour (the pink in my case) is way bigger than it’s meant to be. All the samples and all the projects I saw on instagram have a much narrower band of the contrast colour at the bottom, like a 5cm sort of width. While I don’t mind having a wider band, I do wish the colour change line didn’t cut across my boobs.

I think this is to do with the different instructions for different sizes. The point at which you change colour differs wildly between sizes. In the size M you change to the CC after 28 rows after separating the sleeves, but for the L it’s just 15, and for the 2X it’s just 6, and for the 3X, 1. I did think that was strange when I got to that bit, and asked about it on instagram, but was reassured by lots of people including Maddie herself that this was made up for by the yoke section being bigger in the bigger sizes. I’m fairly sure I didn’t make a mistake in the yoke, so there’s definitely something going on. As I say, all the samples (which look like smaller sizes) have a narrower band, and the yarn needs also tell you you need more of the CC, but I actually ended up using all my pink (so 2 skeins used), and had a skein and a half of the grey left (so 1.5 skeins used), so that’s not right.

Anyway, it’s easily remedied, and I do plan on making this again, and I think I’ll just get 3 skeins of both colours and do the sleeves first, and then knit the body in the main colour until I run out of yarn. I think it would be pretty cool if the colour change line on the sleeve and the body matched up when standing straight as well.

Now I just need to decide on colours… I keep being drawn to the mustard colours and I think the Sunset colourway with one of the more multicoloured ones might be cool.

* linked to Maddie’s instagram as her website is in maintenance mode and I’m not linking to any Ravelry pages given their awful accessibility problems they’re refusing to fix - I don’t want to inadvertendly give anyone a migraine or worse. This pattern here was also the last one I’ll ever have bought through Ravelry, I may still find patterns via there but if the designer doesn’t offer an off-rav buying option I’ll walk away