This one’s more like a jacket. It’s also knit in thick wool, on 8mm needles (the pattern specifies 9 mm but I had to go down a size to get gauge) so it knit up quickly. It was perfect television knitting.
I liked this jacket right from the outset. It’s in the Fall 2010 edition of Vogue Knitting, and was the first pattern – you can see it on Rav, right HERE. Here’s mine:
First modification – I left off the pockets.
Second mod: The back of this sweater, which doesn’t show on the VK link, has three enormous cables down the centre back. They’re kind of neat, because they’re so thick, but my DH took one look and said “looks like dinosaur vertebrae.” That was funny, but it was also a mental image I just couldn’t shake. I decided to ditch those massive cables, and work in the same cable pattern on the back as on the front. See?
(Once again, the flash has messed with the colour. The first photo is more true.)
Notice the construction technique – the back of the collar is knitted in stockinette so that it naturally rolls back. Clever clever!
If you want to do this, you need to recalculate the number of stitches for the back, to be a multiple of 8 plus 1. You also probably want to round down, as those big cables (the ones you won’t be knitting) tend to pull the fabric in quite a bit.
Third mod: Just to keep things interesting, I reversed the cable on the right front so that the two sides mirror each other. On the back, then, the same mirroring happens. I like it, even though I messed up and did it the opposite way around for the front. You wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t told you, right? I did one sleeve with the cable twisted right and one with it twisted left, then matched them to the fronts.
My fourth modification was the sleeve length. I’m not sure why designers think that coats or heavy sweaters should have elbow length sleeves. Maybe it’s a glam downtown look with long leather gloves. To me, it looks like someone miscalculated the yarn requirements. I want my forearms to be warm when it’s cold enough for this sweater! So, I lengthened the sleeves to the wrist.
This big scary calculation was what slowed me down. I put the project aside, because I had to figure this out, then it was summer and too hot to knit it. Ultimately, I decided to cast on 12 fewer stitches than the pattern called for. I did the ribbing at the hem the same as the fronts and back, then on the second cable twist, I increased one stitch at each end of the row. I continued like this, adding two stitches per row on every 8th row, until I had the final stitch count. Then I continued to knit until the sleeves were long enough to reach to the underarms – for me, this was 18″, because the sweater doesn’t fit tightly under the arms.
My only other modification was a yarn substitution. I got lucky one day on a trip to Spinrite, and found that they had bags of six balls of Patons Wool Roving on sale for $6.99. It’s usually that price per ball. (This is Moss, which is kind of an olive colour with some gold, too.) So, the cost of making this jacket was less than fifteen dollars, which works for me in a big way. I might have been able to make one sleeve in the specified yarn for that price.
What do you think?
This is the lace jacket by Brooke Nico from Vogue Knitting fall 2010. I cast it on last fall in Kidsilk Haze, then put it aside for a while. I’ve been charging away on it lately – mostly because it’s so astonishingly pretty – and am now knitting the border. The jacket is constructed as a circle – well, actually, a pentagon – with a border all around the outside of the circle. You leave stitches on holders in two wedges of the pentagon, then go back and make sleeves there. I still have to do that bit. The red stitches toward the centre are those saved stitches.
Alive & Knitting 