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A snag looks worse than it is. A long loop standing up off the surface, a puckered line running away from it in both directions, and the immediate instinct to reach for scissors. Do not. A snag is borrowed yarn, not lost yarn, and in most cases it can be put back where it came from in under five minutes.

Chest measurement gets all the attention when people size knitwear, and it is the wrong first question. A sweater that fits in the chest and sits wrong at the shoulder will pull across the back, restrict your reach, and look off in a way that is hard to name. The shoulder decides more than any other single point, and it is easy to check.

The layer under a knit does two jobs at once. It decides how often the sweater has to be washed, and it supplies most of the visible detail: the collar, the cuff, and whatever shows at the hem. Getting it right is mostly a matter of deciding what you want to show and then choosing something thin enough to disappear where you do not.

Pilling is easy to misread. Small balls appear on the sleeve and the assumption is that something has gone wrong with the sweater. In almost every case nothing has. Pilling is what spun yarn does when it is rubbed, and knowing why it happens tells you both how to remove it properly and how to slow it down.