Knitting Sweaters - 🧶 Then and Now

I’ve been knitting sweaters for s long time - way before the internet existed. 

Not that many years ago (or so it seems!), I’d start a sweater after seeing it in a pattern book in a yarn store. The pattern would tell me what type of yarn to buy: how many balls and which colors. I had no idea who designed the sweater. I’d take the pattern book and the yarn home and start my project… 

That’s how I knit this sweater.

Nowadays it’s different. If I see a sweater online that I’d like to make (usually on Pinterest), I buy the pattern at an online yarn store - or at a pattern site called Ravelry. After downloading it, I print it up on my printer.

After checking the size of needles the pattern calls for, I start to shop for yarn that uses that size of needles.Very rarely am I able to find the same brand of yarn the original sweater is made from.

If the sweater designer has a blog, I sometimes check it out to see what other sweaters he or she has designed. I’m often amazed at how young these sweater designers are! I discover that many patterns show the designers  wearing their creations on the cover of the pattern. And occasionally, I discover they live not that far from me - like this young woman who designed the blue sweater I downloaded and plan to make. She’s a young mom from Montreal!