The yoke was a bit ruffly off the needles. The overall fit was also a bit tight before washing, which was to be expected—and per the design process—based on how the swatch (and the first sweater, the CotLin U-Neck) reacted to the first two wash cycles.

After the first wash cycle, the yoke unevenness remained.

In the first wearing, I felt the need to pull the front hem down repeatedly, as the yoke bunched up above the underarms and the front neck was a bit high for comfort. I probably ought to have done more short rows on the back neck to lower the front neck farther. I don’t have enough experience to know why the front kept riding up. Perhaps the yoke depth was insufficient, especially after the first laundering cycle?

While CotLin worked at my postlaundering gauge of 6.25 spi makes a nicely dense fabric, with a good weight for spring and fall wearing, I did not enjoy working with it nearly as much as I like working with wool, whether regular 100 percent wool or superwash wool combined with nylon in sock yarn. CotLin’s lack of loft tended to make for sore fingers.

The design process worked exactly as I anticipated, so I have no complaints there, but I don’t think the nonresilience of the yarn worked well for a circular yoke. At least not for a circular yoke with only three shaping rounds. If there were more shaping rounds with gentler shaping rates, the resulting fabric might have been smoother.

I do like how the darkest color does fall agreeably at my waist, giving me the optical illusion of the slightest bit of waist definition in my otherwise very rectangular figure. Splitting three of the five colorways into two narrower bands before and after the single tall band helped me use the yarn a bit more evenly than was the case in the CotLin U-Neck.

Final Rating

I give both of these first two sweaters an overall score of 6. The yarn itself was acceptable for a garment, and, as noted above, the design process worked well, but the dye jobs on the two sets of colorways wound up being disappointing.

I would have greatly preferred all the colorways to be speckled, like the three uppermost colorways in the U-Neck and the uppermost colorway of this sweater, but with variegated yarns, you get what you get. I kept having visions of dyeing my own speckled yarns, but I don’t need another fiber hobby at this point!

Prewashed Measurements

• Chest: 32 in
• Hips: 34 in
• Sleeve Circumference: 10.5 in
• Sleeve Length: 6.25 in
• Yoke Depth: 10.25 in
• Back Length: 26.5 in
• Back Neck Width: 6.75 in

Washed-Once Measurements

• Chest: 34 in
• Hips: 36 in
• Sleeve Circumference: 11 in
• Sleeve Length: 5.5 in
• Yoke Depth: 8 5/8 in
• Back Length: 23 in
• Back Neck Width: 7 5/8 in

I expect the circumferences to grow a bit and the lengths to shrink a bit with the second laundering, which is what happened with the U-Neck.

Yarn Usage

• Color 1, Crest: 74.2 g
• Color 2, Tide: 75.6 g
• Color 3, Wave: 78.8 g
• Color 4, Stream: 80.9 g
• Color 5, Eclipse: 86.0 g

The completed sweater weighed 400 g off the needles and 393.3 g after the first laundering cycle. (The above weights total 395.5.)