Looking for a difficult knitting style or technique, and how to tell whether it's been done well
Our Wiki answer:

background information

Trust me when I say realistically there's not alot of difference between knitting a 4" by 4" square and a metre by a meter cot blanket. Size of project is no indication of skill. Typically a good knitter progresses from plain items to fancy. Shawls are definite "I've made it as a knitter" items, &amp; socks can be too. To put it another way, due to shawls using a number of techniques you wouldn't expect a beginner to attempt or be able to make.

Advanced techniques include:
 lace - one very carefully, literally, knits something that resembles lace 

cables, "Aran" is the jargon name

colour work -this includes "fair isle" which is a very particular type.

, "entrellac", (which I've always wanted to do) it looks like someone wove narrow knitted strips together 

jogless stripes, ideally ones stripes don't start/finish with an offset. If you achieve this, your stripes line up perfectly they are said to be jogless

A good knitter has even stitches that are not too loose, not too tight They can find and fix there own mistakes, and use many different "cast on &amp; cast off" techniques. 

If you want to keep the looking at the shoulder of the Jersey/cardigan your sentence could read 


  [Kitchener]Her eyes shot straight to the 
  shoulder seams, looking for the tell tale 
  pucker, but there was nothing but a row of
  perfectly even [pick any expletive] stitches. 


Or


  Short rows? Her eyes shot straight to the 
  neckline, looking for the telltale holes 
  caused by the wraps, but there was 
  nothing but row upon row of perfectly 
  even, perfectly slanting curved knitwork. 
  Row upon row upon row. 
  
  Fair isle? Her eyes shot straight to the 
  colourwork, looking for the telltale 
  puckering of tight floats, but there was 
  nothing but row upon row of perfectly 
  even tension. 


Little Arrowhead stitch  is a difficult technique 


  "She looked at the Little Arrowhead panels, not a stitch or hole was out of place"
  "Well, Is it any good?" Dan said
  [Mia] conceded that "not only is it good, it's amazing" her insides churning as she felt her thing ripped away by [Naomi]'s clearly superior skill. (Lol)


"Oh don't you just love steeking" gushed Naomi, clearly pleased to talk with someone who shared her passion.

"Yes" Mia agreed matching Naomi's tone, unwilling to admit she had no idea what [private derogatory nickname] was on about 

"The thrill as you cut through your stitches; watching them unravel" continued Naomi.
 Mia suddenly realised her new acquaintance had jumped the line between genius and insanity, and was merrily skipping away.

(Steeking scares/horrifies knitters of pretty much any skill level)