The colour is pretty true in this picture. I really like this sweater: it’s light, warm and red! I’m swatching with another yarn (we can gasp in unison at that bit of news) to try the pullover version next.
Here’s a better shot of the buttons that don’t quite match.
They’re a little more pink than russet, but I like those two gold lines in them a lot. They’re staying. 🙂
I’m also embarked on a long-overdue sort of my fabric stash, which will continue to my yarn stash. It’s time to get organized, and time for some things to find new (more appreciative) homes.
I’ve noticed that the fabrics headed out the door fall into three groups: the first group is the biggest. My colouring was Autumn before I let my hair turn grey, so I had a lot of Autumn-favouring fabrics in my stash. I still like the russets and burgundies, the olive and some of the brown. The gold, taupe and beige, though, just don’t work for me anymore. I also used to wear white shirts a lot, and they don’t work for me anymore either —they’ve been culled from my clothing stash and are leaving my fabric stash, too. (There are compensations. Now I can wear black.)
The second group of fabrics are graphic prints. I like bold prints on the bolt and often admire them in the store. Some have come home with me over the years. I tend not to like them as much once they’re garments, or I like them but don’t wear them. They’re leaving, too.
Finally, there’s a shade of pink. Maybe it’s a pink that is supposed to work for Autumn colouring. (?) We used to call it dusty rose – it’s a mucky pink, not a clear clean one. Now it looks like Pepto-bismol to me, so out it goes.
It is very interesting to see how things pull together after my measuring, sorting and stacking. There’s a new cohesiveness in my stash, which I like — it makes me want to display it, not pack it away LOL — and which is also inspiring. I can see how things coordinate and work together, which gets me planning. It’s proving to be a useful exercise, though a time-consuming one. I expect I’ll be sewing more in the near future and not just for the girls. That makes me happy. 🙂
As promised, here’s a post about a sweater knit a while ago. First, let’s talk about the pattern. I used The Incredible Custom-Fit Raglan. I think it appeared in Threads magazine once upon a time and you can find it online now. It’s less of a pattern than a formula, so it can be used for any size of person and any yarn. Here it is on Ravelry with links to the Wayback Machine. It looks like you can download it from Rav, too.
I used this formula a couple of times to make sweaters for Mr. Math, including the Elrond Sweater. That’s the link to my Ravelry project page, and here’s my blog post. Below is the sweater. Ha. I knit it in 2009 and he still loves it. 🙂
The sweater I wanted to write about today, though, is this one, which was knit so long ago that it doesn’t even have a Ravelry project page.
My No. 9 sweater reminded me of it, so I dug it out. This sweater was knit from a huge ball of yarn that I bought at Lewiscraft, probably in the 1970’s. It was called A Pound of Mohair or something similar. (How fun. I found an article on Knitty about Lewiscraft upon its demise in 2006.) As you can see, it was gradient-dyed.
This is not the mohair of KSH but the older variant, which is more prickly and thicker, blended with a bit of synthetic. Hayfield 80 (80% mohair, 10% nylon 10% acrylic) which is an aran weight is more similar to this one. (That’s a Ravelry link.) The scary thing is that I have another 1 lb. cone of similar mohair in graduated tones in my stash, which I bought in NYC, but that’s another story.
So, this cardigan was knit maybe 40 years ago. I was so proud of myself for getting the gradient on the sleeves to match! That was only possible because I used a contrasting yarn for the ribbing, although I don’t remember what it was. It doesn’t have any detail on the ribbing increases – like the one for the mister, the increases are just made on either side of two stitches that define the raglan line. It would be easy to increase the stitch count there and do a little cable, or the P2K2P2 of the No. 9 sweater.
The other cool thing about this sweater are the buttons. They’re clear with bugle beads inside. They’re very sparkly and special – I bought them from a little button shop on Queen Street West in Toronto, which was gone the last time I went looking for it. It was one of those places with all the boxes of buttons, and you bought buttons individually. (Yes, I have a button stash. Don’t you?)
I used similar gold buttons that have metallic threads inside, bought at the same time, on my felted Stripey Noro messenger bag. (That link goes to the pattern page at Ravelry. This design of mine is a free pattern download.)
This button place reminded me of excursions with my mom when I was a kid – she would make the trek from suburbia on public transit to Dressmakers’ Supply on Avenue Road for notions like buttons. I thought it was an amazing place – all those boxes of buttons, sorted by colour! I also thought it was about six million miles north of Bloor St., but really it was maybe three blocks. We always walked that bit. Dressmakers’ Supply moved down to Queen St. West at some point and has since closed down.
There is another button store on Queen St. West now called Trillium Button – or maybe it’s the same place but on the other side of the street now – which I’ll have to check out the next time I’m downtown. Ha! I found a blog post from 2012 about the button store and it IS the same store, but moved west and to the north side of the street. Definitely worth a trip. (Here’s that blog post, which has some pix.)
And hmm. Now I’m wondering what to do with all that mohair in the stash…
Last year, I knit a lot for the girls as there’s something satisfying about finishing up a project quickly. It was time for a human-sized knit! This sweater for me really took a while, as I knitted it twice. Will I ever learn to knit a gauge swatch? Probably not. I just don’t like doing it and if the price is having to knit something twice, well, I don’t mind so very much. Usually, I realize what I’ve done sooner than I did this time. Often, I find other things I want to change in the sweater, anyway. That happened this time, too.
So, let’s take a look. The pattern is Sweater No. 9 by My Favourite Things. Here’s a Ravelry link and here’s the link to the pattern on the designer’s website. It’s a top-down sweater with some ribbing detail on the raglan lines, with two suggested lengths. Here’s one of the designer’s official pix:
I used some Rowan Kidsilk Haze Trio from my stash, in Loganberry. This yarn is wonderful and squishy as well as very light. It’s discontinued now, but you could replicate it easily by knitting with three strands of KSH (or similar) held together. The colourways have three different harmonious colours each – this one has a red, a burgundy and a more orangey-red hue.
Here’s a pic of the yarn, knitted up in green and in the ball in the red, as well as my Felix cardigan knit of a KSH-ish yarn held with a fingering weight merino. That gives a similar effect to the KSH trio but is a little bit heavier:
I had bought this yarn in two colourways, as you see above, and knit a sweater of the green colourway, called Fern, a while back. I used a Rowan pattern called Paige but turned it into a cardigan. Here’s my Ravelry project page and here’s my blog post. I don’t wear that one much, because the drop shoulders and the length make it seem like a droopy blanket. It is very light and warm, though. Here’s that sweater:
And here’s the new red cardigan – with one sleeve still on the needles. The pictures are less than ideal as it’s snowing and grey today. There’s not a lot of light, even with all the lights on in the kitchen.
I’ll finish it up this week – this yarn knits up quickly! – and when there’s a sunny day, I’ll take a pic of it outside.
The benefit of knitting something twice is that I can see what things I don’t love and change them out in my version. For example, I really dislike when ribbing doesn’t line up with the pattern in the body of the sweater. If you’re knitting a K2 P1 rib for the collar, as here, and there’s a K2 in the raglan rib, they should align IMO so that the K2 in the ribbing just continues on down into the sweater. That isn’t going to work in this case, since there’s only a P1 on either side of the K2 and the raglan lines are P2 K2 P2. So I changed the counts in my collar, plotting out the placement of the raglan lines from the outset and working P2 K2 P2 in the collar to line up with that. You can see the knit ridge in this photo, that continues up the collar.
My second change was also a result of that test knit. I tried on the sweater and oooooo, that yarn was itchy itchy on my throat. I know I can’t wear KSH against my skin but I had a moment of (unmerited) optimism. So, when I ripped it back, I split the front of the sweater, turning it into a cardigan with two moss stitch bands down the front. I wasn’t sure of my ultimate row count so I winged it with the buttonholes, but it worked out fairly well.
My third change was a result of comments on Ravelry. The fronts and the backs of a sweater should not be the same and interchangeable, since the neck should be lower in the front. I added four short rows between the back raglan increases before starting those raglan increases – I could see the P2 K2 P2 place in the ribbing – to make the back a little higher at the neck. It was an easy change.
Change number four was an inadvertent one. I finished the yoke and wasn’t sure what to do with the ribbing lines from the raglan once the body was joined in the round. Just stopping them looked silly to me, so I picked up an extra stitch to have another K stitch in the middle of the 4 purls, and carried them down the virtual side seam of the sweater. To my delight, everything matched up at the hem for the K2 P1 ribbing at the waist, just as I’d set it in the collar.
There are two suggested lengths in the pattern for the sweater and mine is in between. I tried it on, because there were a couple of Ravelry comments about the hem being in an unfortunate location and I wanted to be sure. I generally don’t like cropped sweaters as they seem too short for me, and as a shorter person, I often need to shorten a “regular” length sweater so I don’t look overwhelmed. 12.5 – 13″ from underarm to hem is good for me. That’s 32 – 33cm. This one is 22 cm from underarm to the top of the ribbing and the waist ribbing is 10 cm. It’s perfect for me.
The buttons aren’t a perfect match – a bit more burgundy than russet – but I like the bit of gold in them and they came from my stash, which is even better. (That is a fuzzy pic!) The funny thing about them is that the shafts aren’t all drilled at the same angle. I’m a little OCD about things lining up and buttons being at the same angle, so I may take these off and re-sew them so that the little gold swoosh has the same orientation on all of them. Right now, all the buttons are sewn on with the hole in the shaft at the same angle.
I really like this sweater. I like it so much that I’m thinking of ripping back the Ferny Paige and knitting a green version of this sweater of that yarn instead. I also have a sweater quantity of a tweedy yarn in the same weight, so will try the pullover with that first.
It also reminds me of a mohair sweater I knit a looooooong time ago, and I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.
Despite my doubts about the tightness of the foundation I-cord, I carried on.
Here’s the jacket so far, laid flat:
I’m working to the left, which will be the left front when it mirrors the part on the right. The back is in the middle, those dips are for the sleeves, and that blue-green-pink square at the top of the mountain is the top of the center back.
The colours are pretty. I’m surprised that the colourway on each block wants to repeat itself – look at the pair on either side of the deep V for the sleeve on the right. There are two blue-green-pink squares right beside each other (although one is on the front and one on the back) then right above them pink-purple-pink, in a mirror image. That’s when I noticed this tendency so I made sure the next one didn’t mirror, by changing balls. I wanted the colour to look more random, but it isn’t. That I-cord is curling, but since it’s the foundation row, I’d need to frog everything to make it looser.
I have a suspicion that the cardigan is going to make me look like a hobbit. Here it is with the fronts folded in place. It’s bulky.
I decided to remove the wooden needle at the front – where I’ve picked up and knit the stitches for the next square – then give the work-in-progress a good soak. I don’t usually block a project that isn’t done, but I need to check what that hem is going to do. I also want to confirm the fit before carrying on. I could add another row of squares to the top to make it longer, for example, if it’s going to fall at a cropped length. It’s unlikely that I could find more yarn in the same colourway and dye lot, but the sleeves are striped – I could do alternating stripes of Ito and another solid Noro colourway. (Maybe a purple.)
To my relief, the soaking made the points in I-cord easier to stretch out flat. I didn’t pin them since this isn’t the final block, but I’m more confident that I’ll be able to convince them to do that. (If I made it again – ha! – I would use a larger needle for the I-cord.) The dimensions didn’t change much, so I’ll carry on. I’ll update you when there’s more to share.
Here’s another little cardigan from Martin Storey, originally designed for Rowan TrueSilk, a summer sweater called Peridot. (That’s a Ravelry link.) The pattern is in a book called the Rowan Truesilk Collection. Here’s Rowan’s picture of Peridot:
The only thing I didn’t like about this was the multi-coloured buttons, but that’s easy to fix. I knit mine in Patons Silk Bamboo in Sapphire. (Also a Ravelry link since the yarn is discontinued.) It’s a pretty simple sweater, which means I have no explanation for its lengthy time-out. I cast on in July 2015 and stalled after the back and one front were knit. (Sometimes Ravelry is a little bit terrifying in the information it provides. 2015! Gah.)
Recently, I picked up this project again, determined to finish it up. Here’s the completed back.
I really like this colour of the Silk Bamboo. You can see that this is going to be an a-line sweater – and the great thing about a traditional construction is that it’s easy to measure the pieces and check the fit before knitting the whole thing. This one is going to be a keeper. It has a lovely drape.
It obviously needs to be blocked after all its time in the project bag, but as usual when I pick up a stalled project, there’s less to do than I’d thought. I have most of one front done, and the sleeves are only 3/4 length. The plain knitting makes it great for TV knitting – even with the increases – so I’m working on this one again. I hope to have it done soon.
I started this project a year ago, in February 2022. (It was a free pattern then, but might not be so now.) I liked the design a lot but didn’t want to buy more yarn, so I shopped my stash. I came up with some Koigu KPPPM in a mixy blue and some Rowan Kidsilk Haze in Turkish Plum which matched. The resulting fabric is lovely and soft, with enough variation from the Koigu to make the colour interesting.
Mmm. Squishy goodness.
The construction is interesting. You can tell by the ridges that it’s a sideways knit. You cast on provisionally at what might be considered a sideseam, knit across the back, cast off stitches for the sleeve, then knit across one front. You put those stitches on a holder. You go back to the provisional cast-on to pick up enough stitches for the other front, then when it’s done, put them on a holder. You sew the shoulder seams, then start knitting those front stitches, up one side, pick up stitches across the back for the collar, then down the other front. This makes a self-rolling shawl collar after you knit five inches of it. Then you go back to each sleeve opening to pick up stitches and knit in the round, decreasing down to each cuff.
By the elbow of the second sleeve, I was sure that I would run out of yarn. I stopped knitting so I could look for something matchy-matchy at the Koigu tent sale in August. The best I could do was some solid-ish navy (it looks kettle-dyed) so I decided to use it on the cuffs and the front edge of the collar, if necessary. I frogged a lot of the collar to be sure I had enough Koigu for the second sleeve. By this time, I’d lost momentum and the project sat. As is so often the case, I picked it up finally and finished it in a couple of evenings.
And – ha! – I didn’t run out of yarn. I took the remaining Koigu and knit on the collar until it was gone.
Here’s Halo completed.
Morning sunlight through the tree branches makes for dappled light and shadow. 🙂
Mine came out a bit smaller than anticipated. I made the larger size, which meant it should have been 25″ long and 48″ wide. There’s no row gauge specified, probably because it’s stretchy, but the stitch gauge is 20 sts to 4″. Mine is right on, but my sweater is 22″ long and 42″ wide. So, if and when I make another of these cardigans, I’ll add 15 stitches to the length and 7 or 8 repeats to the width, probably 4 across the back and 4 on each front.
I’m thinking I might knit a second one of these rather than another Lunenberg-meets-Hebrides cardigan. I have more of the KPPPM in the teal colourway than I had of the navy, so that should work out well – plus I have KSH in Trance to knit with it. Or I might buy a Halo bundle from Fleece Artist and actually knit the sweater in the specified yarn. (Had to sit down for a minute there. Phew. What a concept.) We’ll see after I finish up a few projects still on the go.
Now I’m digging out old sweaters that I’ve never blogged about. 🙂 Today I’m posting about my Scandinavian Family cardigan from Knitting the New Classics by Kristin Nicholas. (The title and the book cover are linked to the Ravelry page since this book is out of print. It was published in 1995.)
The Scandinavian Family sweater is stranded knitting, with contrast bands at the shoulders and hems. It’s a drop shoulder boxy design (more square pieces!) and I had some fun mixing up the colours.
One of the interesting changes in patterns is that many companies (like Rowan and Elite) once offered many size variations in each design, so you could make the same sweater pattern for every member of the family. (Rowan also used to offer sleeve and length variations.) Here’s the photo spread for this sweater from the book:
The picture is dark so it didn’t photograph that well, but they’re all wearing a version of the same sweater.
And here’s my version:
I split mine up the front to make a cardigan, which meant I added facings all around. I started with the mixy gold blend in the borders, which had been in my grandmother’s yarn stash, and chose colours to coordinate with it. I have no idea what the content of it is – it was a huge handwound ball when I got it. The green and white yarns used in the main body are from a farm/mill that used to be near Ottawa called Belle Vallée Wools. (They might still exist. I’m not sure.) I bought the green and white in Carleton Place on a road trip to Ottawa in the mid-90s. The yarn is a lot like Briggs & Little Regal. Many of the colours in the yoke are actually fingering weight and I held them double. Again, I bought yarns all over the place, but mostly on that road trip.
A detail pic. I love this fair isle pattern and all the colours in the green tweedy wool:
This is a really warm sweater, probably because it’s knit tightly. No worries about the wind with this one! The other thing about this kind of wool is that it doesn’t change much over time. It doesn’t pill or show wear the way that softer yarns do. This sweatter looks very similar to the day it came off the needles, thirty years ago, and not because I haven’t worn it.
This year, I have a plan to finish up some of the projects that are on my needles. Some of them have been waiting for my attention for a while. (Sleeve Island is a precarious location for me. Sweaters can be marooned there for years!) I had a look through all the project bags at the first of the year and chose this one to finish up first.
Audrey is a cardigan designed by Martin Storey in Rowan Angora Haze. It’s on the cover of the pattern book, Rowan Angora Haze, which is now discontinued. (That’s a Ravelry link for the pattern book.) The yarn is also discontinued. Here’s the Ravelry link for Rowan Angora Haze yarn and here’s the Ravelry link for Audrey.
It’s a pretty cardigan in a very fuzzy soft yarn. I’ve blogged about this one before, since it’s been SEVEN years since I cast it on. Gah. It’s ten years since I bought the yarn and the pattern, which means it aged in the stash even before I cast on. (This little summary and a birthday on the horizon makes me give my stash a side-eye.)
Let’s look at those blog posts before we explore the why of the timeline. Here’s the first one, and there’s a mention of my Audrey in this post, then here’s the most recent post about (ha) the plan to finish it, dating from two years ago.
The big issue with this knit was that I didn’t like the shape of the sweater as designed. It’s kind of an 80’s shape, with wide shoulders and a narrow waist, an inverted triangle. I didn’t originally realize that from the pictures – I saw it in the schematics and instructions. As a pear-shaped individual myself, I knew this wouldn’t work. I eliminated the increases in the upper body, which then meant that the armhole decreases and the shoulder cap had to be recalculated. I also changed the neck, so that there’s another button there instead of a ribbon threaded through a casing. Then I discovered that the sleeve instructions made a sleeve that was far wider than I wanted, so I frogged the sleeves back and started them again. Finally, the dark fuzzy wool was tough to read in the cable and eyelet pattern. This wasn’t television knitting at all, even though I soon memorized the pattern stitch.
This project was castaway on Sleeve Island twice – once for the recalculation of the sleeve cap and once for ennui – as well as having an earlier time-out or two. The yarn shed like mad at first, even after being put in the freezer (that’s an old tip for sheddy yarn) but when I picked it up this last time, it seemed to be shedding less. That’s a good sign for actually wearing the sweater and not having everything I own covered in purple fuzz.
Here are some in-progress pix of the body of the sweater from those older posts, one with a test button. I’m going with those faceted clear ones – they’re pretty but not too fussy. A plain button wouldn’t be right with this sweater IMO.
Now it’s done (finally!) and I love it. It’s very soft and fits exactly as I’d planned (yay), and oh, it’s warm!
And here it is FINISHED!
I bought 12 balls of yarn and used almost 10.5 of them, which means the sweater took 1438 m or 1573 yards. (I don’t even want to think about how many of them I knit twice.) Here’s my Ravelry project page.
If I knit it again (not a chance!) I’d make the armhole a little more shallow, maybe even an inch. I’d add that length into the body so the sweater overall was the same length. I bought 12 balls of black Angora Haze way back in 2013, enough to make this sweater, but I think I’ll knit it into something more plain than this cardigan.
Here’s a sweater I started a while ago and shoved away. I dug it out again recently and got back to work. What made me put it away? The yarn is black and it’s Rowan Kidsilk Haze – and I knit at night while watching TV. Fortunately, it’s in stockinette and I was able to find my rhythm this time.
Here’s the current state of my progress on the back of the sweater:
You can see that it’s crumpled where it was shoved in the bag. What I’ve knit recently is smoother. The pattern is Hebrides, which was a free pattern from Rowan by Lisa Richardson – although it was designed for Kidsilk Haze Stripe. I knit it twice in that yarn:
It’s just a basic sweater with long sleeves and a round neck. I wear these cardigans all the time, especially the purple and green one. The KSH is awesome, too – the sweater is light (it weighs less than 150g) and I especially loved it for travel. You can scrunch it into any bag then pull it out whenever you need it.
I’ve needed a plain black cardigan for a long time and had the black KSH in my stash, so a match was made. Sometimes Ravelry is a bit scary – I evidently cast on the back of this sweater in July 2016. (!!) Well, I’ll get it done by next July. I remember that the back was the trudge and the project picked up speed after that. Maybe not the best choice of a night knitting project in the winter, but knitting KSH in the summer heat didn’t work out either.
I’ll keep on keeping on with this one, but will probably sneak some smaller projects into the queue in between.
We took a little road trip last week and went to the tent sale at the Koigu farm. This annual event has been on hiatus thanks to the pandemic, and I was really excited that it happened this year again. Here’s an old picture of the Koigu barn, taken the first year we went to the tent sale:
Of course, I bought some (more) KPPPM home. 🙂 I have such a hard time choosing from the array of colours at this sale, but here’s this year’s selection:
The top seven are all the same colour and dye lot. They’re a little less blue than they look here, more pinky-lavender. I’ve already balled one up and cast on a Tegna. I’ll show you that when I’ve made more progress than just casting on.
The blue at the bottom left is insurance yarn for my Halo jacket. (That’s the Ravelry link for the pattern. Here’s my previous post about mine.) I think I’m going to run out of the KPPPM blue before I get to the cuffs. (Yes, I’m knitting faster, just in case.) That’s not a huge surprise as I’m a bit short on the yarn requirements.
This jacket has an interesting construction – it’s knit sideways, starting at one side. You knit across the back and around to the centre front, then go back to the cast-on edge and knit to the other front. Then you pick up the stitches from the shoulder to knit down each sleeve to the cuff. I love the feel of the KPPPM knit with Rowan Kidsilk Haze – it’s a wonderfully squishy soft sweater. When I started the sleeves, I had two skeins of KPPPM left, so one for each sleeve, then (maybe) some of this other blue at the cuff.
Here’s my progress on Halo so far:
The other four skeins that I bought at the tent sale are just pretty. They’re more earth-toned than they look here, russet and brown with some green. Three are the same colourway and I chose the dark one because it coordinated. I think they’ll be a shawl, probably another Charlotte’s Web. The one I made for Nikoo used four skeins and it was a nice size, even without the fringe.
I hope they have the tent sale again next year. By then, I might have more of my Koigu stash knit up.
Alive & Knitting 