Briar Rose Vintage KAL: Finished sweater round-up!

Well everyone, we’ve reached the official end of the Briar Rose Vintage Knit-along!

It’s been a wonderful experience leading you all through it. I learned some things about my own knitting and my knitting processes along the way. I hope I’ve helped you gain confidence in your own knitting skills and your ability to resize a sweater pattern, and hope you’ll want to seek out more vintage knitting patterns in the future!

I’d like to share my own finished sweater photos. I’m very pleased with how it turned out. My only annoyance is that I didn’t actually measure the length between my armpit and elbow, so my sleeves are about an inch longer than I would have liked (you can tell because the ribbing bunches in my elbow a bit), and I probably could have stood to cast on a few less stitches for the sleeve in general. But minor quibbles on a sweater that will hopefully fill a big hole in my wardrobe.

My gauge was 6.5 stitches per inch over 9 rows on size 3.0mm needles, working the ribbing, collar and pocket on 2.75mm needles. I knit plain sleeve caps instead of pleated ones, worked the collar by picking up stitches along the neck (described in this post), worked short row shoulders with a three needle bind off and knit the body in the round to the armholes. I knit it with approximately 2 inches of negative ease at the bust, and knit the body 13.5″ tall from the cast on edge to the beginning of the armhole bind off.

I love how the buttons matched. They have a teensy little rhinestone in the middle with gold rays spreading out from them. And I love the little pocket! Wouldn’t it be cute with a tiny little hankie sticking out?

I usually wear my vintage sweaters pulled down, but I also like the look that you see with some vintage sweaters, where you hike it up a bit at your waist and let the eased length sit on top of the ribbing. I think in order for that to work more successfully however (i.e. not shift around while I’m wearing it), I’d need to knit the ribbing with a couple inches of negative ease, too, which I don’t usually do but may start to in the future.

Overall I’m very happy with my Briar Rose, and I hope to get a lot of wear out of it this summer!

(In case you’re curious about the rest of my outfit, those are my Heyday trousers on which I swapped the buttons for red vintage ones, and Sven clogs which aren’t vintage at all but oh oh OH, how I love them.)

Finished sweater round-up!

Now, it’s time to show off YOUR Briar Rose sweaters!

I know there are several of you who have finished your Briar Rose sweaters already. Some have already been posted to the Flickr group pool, and I encourage anyone who finishes after the deadline to post their photos in the group as well! I will of course leave the group open as a record of our knit-along. I’m also borrowing an idea from Casey’s Swing Dress Sew-Along and including a way for you to add a link to your finished Briar Rose to this post, so everyone can see it and celebrate with you! You can link it to your blog post or a Flickr photo.

Please add your link below (and feel free to include a link in the comments on this post, too):

Thanks for joining in this challenge and trusting me as your fearless leader! I definitely hope to host some vintage knit-alongs in the future (though it’ll probably be a few months before I can contemplate another one, lol). If you’ve got any ideas for what you might like to participate in, please do let me know via comment or email!

Congratulations, everyone!!