Ellie & Mac "favorite sweater" pattern - off the shoulder sweater

Around Christmas Ellie & Mac was having a big pattern sale and I picked up a few of their patterns. I hadn't made any of their patterns before, but they were cute and modern so I thought I'd give them a whirl. Their patterns are very reasonably priced for an indie designer and they have regular sales so I can definitely see myself buying more in future....I bought five at Christmas so, it'll take me a bit to sew these up!

Ellie & Mac has a very inclusive size range, which is a really nice feature and makes me want to support them more. I'm shocked when my hip size is the largest offered. I'm a RTW size 12! Hello? Women come in a lot of sizes and shapes! Grading between sizes is much easier when there is a big range to blend among.

I started with the "Favorite Sweater" pattern, kind of a presumptuous name huh? It's an off-the-shoulder pattern with an option for a cowl neck or band and a curved hem or band. It needs a 50% 4-way stretch and suggests a sweater knit.

I wanted to the cowl option but I did not have enough fabric, so I went with the band and the curved hem. I used almost all of my 2 yards of fabric.

Alterations & Pattern Issues
I graded from a large bust to an XL waist/hip, normal alteration for me. I also lengthened the pattern at the lengthen/shorten line by an inch based on my height as was suggested by the pattern directions.

The pattern directions specify to check the shoulder width and grade to your size but it very annoyingly doesn't say how to do this and I haven't graded my shoulder before. This pattern has a lot of directions on different changes like how to do a full-bust adjustment and very specifically how to print a PDF pattern etc but it says this is really important in the directions and then has no information on how to do it. This was the only real issue I had with the pattern and directions and I probably wouldn't have expected it to have information on this if it didn't have directions on other alterations, like a full bust adjustment.

So, my shoulder width was larger than the rest of my size. I needed to go to 2XL. So I extended the width of my shoulder to the larger size on the front/back piece and shoulder piece at the top and then re-drew the armhole using my dress curve (make sure to use the armhole section).

I was nervous about this but it worked out well. Whew!

The sewing directions were clear with good pictures. There isn't a cutting layout but I don't tend to use them so that didn't bother me. The only thing I wasn't sure about looking at the directions was how to cut the cowl piece, it's supposed to be cut on a double fold. I didn't make the cowl neck but I want to in the future so I will have to figure it out!

Fabric

Wavy sample!

Holy cow is sweater knit a pain. This was my first time sewing with it and I think I chose 
poorly. It was a pretty but loose weave, really stretchy knit that I ordered from CaliFabrics. I tried a lot of settings on my serger to get this to sew properly but no matter what, when I would stretch the seam it would not recover (return to pre-stretched look) and become wavy. After a lot of frustration and samples, I ended up sewing clear elastic in every seam except the bottom hem. I used over 5 yards of elastic!

It was also such a loose weave, pins fell right out of it! Instead, I used fabric clips. I'm kind of old school in my preference for pins but for this project, clips were much better. The right tool for the right job!

For the bottom hem, I used an iron on knit stabilizer and finished it with a double needle.

Choose your fabric wisely :)

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