Kneedles & Life

For Christmas, my husband asked for matching Weasley sweaters for the fam. The task seemed daunting but I’m so glad I went for it because they turned out beautiful and he was so happy. My 19 month old even loved hers because she’s become really interested in letters recently.

I searched high and low for a pattern and found literally ONE but wasn’t happy with construction. It was knit in pieces and then seamed together, and it also didn’t offer letter charts. So I looked for sweater patterns I could possibly use as a base and I found the perfect one I’ll talk about below.

I hope this post is helpful if you’re wanting to knit your own Weasley sweater! It’s so much fun and special too.

Yarn

I wish I had taken a picture of the yarn when it came because each ball is only 50 grams so it looked like A LOT and was super daunting. It was fun to go through so much yarn so quickly, though. If you’re a maker then you know how rewarding it is to bust a stash. 🙂

I purchased and used KnitPicks Wool of the Andes Tweed for mine and my husbands, and Wool of the Andes Superwash for Madeline’s and the yellow letter. Full disclosure, this yarn is itchy, but it’s gorgeous and WARM. We just wore a shirt underneath and it was cozy. I used the superwash for Maddie’s in case I wanted to machine wash it.

For my husbands, I used the color Lighthouse Heather. For mine, I used Down Heather. For Maddie’s, I used Hollyberry and the yellow letters were stitched with Brass Heather.

Pattern

As I previously mentioned, I couldn’t find a pattern so I used a different pattern as a base. With Justyna’s permission, I used her beautiful Homebody Sweater and very slightly adapted it to look just like a Weasley sweater. You can find the pattern from Lady Jay Crochet on Ravelry here.

I want to pause and emphasize how important it is to respect garment designers and either check their policies or ask permission before changing anything their pattern. So much work goes into designing and putting a pattern out into the world and it’s just common curtesy to take their feelings and boundaries into account. Justyna was so kind and allowed me to use this pattern as a base with credit (and she said it is fine if you do too), but she definitely didn’t have to. Lastly, do not change a pattern and then call it your own! *steps down off soap box*

So! The good news is this pattern is literally perfect and is written in a wide range of sizes. The small change I made to each sweater was knitting stockinette for the whole body instead of starting with ribbing on the bottom. When I knit the neckline I also knit stockinette instead of ribbing. If you’re familiar with Weasley sweaters then you’ll see the bottom and neckline curl. You’ll want to take that into account for the length and knit a little extra. The cuffs are ribbed so I followed the pattern for the arms. If you want it baggy you’ll want to knit a size up which is what I did for my husbands.

For Maddie’s, I measured a sweater she had in her closet and just kind of winged it. I had already made mine and my husbands so I measured my gauge and figured out how many stitches I needed for the body and then the rest of the sweater is easy to just figure out with measurements, following the same construction from Justyna’s sweater.

For the letters, I used duplicate stitches after the sweaters were finished. You can tell if you look closely but it only adds to the charm of these sweaters. This was my first time doing a big duplicate stitch project so I was pretty proud of myself. I started with Maddie’s so if I made a mistake it would be smaller. Here’s a great tutorial on YouTube for how to create duplicate stitches.

Okay so here’s how I created a chart for the letters. I scoured the internet for Weasley sweater letter charts and surprisingly found none. I went to Stitch Fiddle and started my own chart. I selected Knitting > Colors > From Picture. Next you’ll want to find a letter you like online. You could blow one up to fill a page in a word document. I simply Google searched for Weasley sweaters with the letter I needed. Then I screenshotted the letter and cropped it as close to the letter as I could. Here’s an example of the T I used:

Next, upload it onto your Stitch Fiddle chart. Now you’ll need to measure the area where you want to your letter to go on the sweater and count the stitches across and down. Over on the left of the screen, click the box that says “exact size” and then type in the stitch counts (see picture below). Click “save chart” and it’ll create the chart for you! I skipped the signup but I guess you can save it for later if you do create an account. This was so easy and amazing to me!

I used a few stitch markers to mark the top, bottom, and sides of the letters on the sweater to help me know where I was when following the chart. Another tip is don’t try to do the whole letter with one strand of yarn. It’ll take multiple pieces and you can start and stop anywhere. I tied all the loose strands together on the inside to secure them.

One skein of the yellow yarn made all three letters with about half leftover. It doesn’t take much!

Blocking

I wet blocked my sweater because I wanted it to stretch a bit. After blocking, the bottom barely curled at all. For my husband’s and Maddie’s sweaters I only pinned the bottom down and steamed them. This relaxed the curl a lot but not as much as mine. So it just depends what you want – either blocking method will be fine for these sweaters!

The last step is to wear them on Christmas morning and make sure you say Happy Christmas! If you have any questions that I didn’t cover, feel free to leave a comment or ask me on Instagram!

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