PhD Sweater #4: Georgetown

I’m so pleased to share Georgetown, my cozy and versatile fourth year PhD sweater. If you’re new around here, I’m knitting a sweater in each year of my PhD to commemorate the process and maintain my sanity. And if you’ve been around for a while, you may be wondering where sweater #3 is…it’s finished, photographed, and has been well worn, but it hasn’t quite made it over to the blog. Soon.
I had some criteria in mind when I went to choose a pattern for this fourth year sweater. I knew that I wanted a cozy sweater for the dissertating year ahead of me. I wanted it to be very versatile so that I could throw it on with a variety of tops in my wardrobe and look presentable enough for a run to the library or an afternoon writing at a coffee shop. I didn’t want it to be too warm, but I also wanted it to be warm enough to get me through the winter months, even if we move back to Minnesota. Ultimately, I settled on the Georgetown cardigan in heathered gray Cascade 220.
Even though this is meant to be a cozy sweater, I wanted it to fit me well so that I could wear it to meetings on campus or even to teach (though I won’t be doing any of that next year while I write). In order to get a fit I was happy with, I compared the pattern’s schematic to both my own measurements and a RTW cardigan I love. If you head over to my project page on ravelry, you can see where I’ve jotted down my measurements.
The math came into play when I calculated the waist shaping using Ysolda’s book. This is one part of sweater fit that I’m still figuring out. I like to have some waist shaping because I’m a classic hourglass and don’t want excess fabric floating around my waist, but knitted fabric stretches, and it’s hard to account for that. In this sweater without any closures, I may have overdone the waist shaping a bit, but that won’t stop me from wearing it all the time.

A nice feature of this pattern is that it gives both seamed and mostly seamless options for construction. I like the structure of a seamed sweater as well as the ease of working with smaller pieces as I knit, so I went for the seamed option and was happy with my choice.
That collar is eight inches of 1×1 ribbing over who-knows-how-many stitches, so it’s not for the faint of heart. It took me a good while to finish that portion of the knitting, but luckily I’m not someone who minds ribbing too much, and the big, huge collar is worth it. This sweater is exactly what I’d been hoping for, and I’m almost happy that spring hasn’t quite arrived so I can get a few wears out of it before things warm up.
Pattern: Georgetown by Hannah Fettig in Home & Away
Yarn: 6 skeins Cascade 220 in #8400 Charcoal Gray
Needles: US 4 & 6 bamboo circulars
Made for: Me
Timeline: 16 January – 27 March 2016
Modifications: shaping and fitting
Worst Part: can’t think of one
Best Part: the versatility of this sweater. I look forward to wearing it all the time!

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