From Roving to Sweater - completed at last!

In 2009 I wrote about my quest to knit a cardigan using handspun.  I consider myself an advanced beginner to intermediate spinner.  Basically, I spin the yarn the roving wants to be - and that's usually about sport weight.  Which means I have to spin a lot for a sweater.  While I've knitted since grade school (40+ years - OMG!), I've mostly knitted stuffed animals and things that I didn't have to worry too much about the gauge. I'm a very loose knitter and usually have to drop 2 or 3 needle sizes to get the gauge. So I must have been a little crazy at the time to decide to do this, but it worked.

I found some beautiful Shetland roving in blue (my mother's favorite color) with a strip of gray that I thought would make a pretty heathery yarn.  I was told it would take 2 pounds to make a sweater, so that's what I bought.

Then I spun the yarn.  Surprisingly, this only took 4 months.  I did spin a lot during this time though.

I found a raglan sweater pattern on the internet that looked nice.  After knitting some swatches and calculating my gauge, I modified the pattern accordingly.  Then I had to figure out how to knit the buttonholes.  My mom is 93 years old, mostly blind, and needs an obvious buttonhole.  I knitted samples with the ones in the pattern, but they were too small and too hard to find, so I searched on the internet for an alternative and found a very nice tutorial on different button holes.  I chose buttonhole #5, which would work well with a 3/4" button that's easy for Mom to manipulate.  What on earth would I have done without the internet?

As expected, the sweater took a while to knit. I knit the body last winter.  It's hard to knit a wool sweater in the summer time -- it's just too hot to have that big pile of wool in my lap.  But I wanted to get it done so she could wear it when it got cool again this fall.  I finished the sweater in October, so about a year and a half from when I bought the roving.  And Mom loves it, which is most important.