Hand-knitted sweaters not only have styles and patterns that you can arrange as you like, it is a leisure, relaxing and beautiful enjoyment, but also beneficial to the development of physical and mental health. Learning to knit a sweater can also give your best friend a special gift.

In addition, there are many benefits of hand knitting, which most people don't know, let's take a look.

1. Relieve stress

Craft-making activities such as knitting can be a natural antidepressant, lowering heart rate and blood pressure, reducing stress, preventing brain aging, and even being effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is because manual activities such as knitting trigger the release of dopamine in the brain, and like meditation and yoga, the repetitive movements of needle and thread activate the parasympathetic nervous system, creating a state of relaxation .

2. Exercise your brain

The movement of fingers is absolutely related to the thinking of the brain. Hand-knitting wool, hand, eye, and brain are used together, and the coordinated movements of fingers and wrist are beneficial to the body's microcirculation and physical exercise. When weaving is accompanied by music, it can increase the release of endorphins in the brain, improve brain function, relax tension and relieve fatigue.

In addition, knitting sweaters can also prevent Alzheimer's disease, relieve anxiety and irritability symptoms, prevent muscle atrophy and low muscle strength, and prevent hand numbness and pen-holding weakness caused by long-term writing and painting.

Knowing the benefits of these sweaters, we can make some preparations for our own experiments, let us know what to pay attention to when knitting sweaters for the first time.

1. Buy the right wool

To choose a good wool, you must first have a certain understanding of wool. Wool is the natural hair that grows on the sheep. It has a natural curl. It is soft, smooth and has a good thermal insulation effect, so the sheep will not be frozen in ice and snow. That's why people love to knit sweaters from wool.

Since the wool is no longer bent after processing, we cannot tell with the naked eye whether it is made of wool. We can first make a preliminary judgment by hand. Wool made of pure wool feels soft, delicate, smooth, elastic and shiny.

After the first step above, if you are still not sure whether the wool you want to buy is real wool, you can also use this method to identify. If a kind of yarn is mixed with rabbit hair and other hair, then you use this yarn to wipe your fiber clothes and pants. If your clothes and pants are easily covered with dander, it means that this is not the pure wool yarn.

2. Buy the right sweater knitting chart

If you are knitting according to the pattern, you can focus on the required knitting skills. When you have mastered the skills, you can try to change the pattern or design your own style without the pattern the next time you knit a sweater.

The most common is that the sweater in the knitting diagram is not big enough, so knit a few more stitches to widen it. However, the number of stitches added to the cuff will affect the number of stitches on the shoulders and neckline.

Therefore, we should think about it before weaving. It is best to have a comprehensive plan. Don't wait until later, it will be a waste of time. Knitting with larger or smaller needles also requires recalculating the number of stitches.

3. Formulate weaving elastic standards

Successful weaving largely depends on the setting of weave density standards. It is therefore recommended that you first weave a swatch. If this step is ignored then you will definitely not be able to knit the size you want, so it is more appropriate to make a standard in advance and compare the standard later for knitting.