Ruthless Knitting

The second sleeve for the herringbone sweater progresses slowly. Meanwhile, my mom sent me some buttons from Portland that she thought might work out for the Middlebury cardigan, and they are just the thing. Mom saves the day again!

Pattern: My own
Size: 37″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 13″ shoulder to shoulder, 16″ to underarm on sleeve, 9″ armscye
Yarn: Laughing Tree Farm 2 Ply (60 percent mohair, 40 percent merino wool; 212 yds per 4 oz skein), three skeins of Chocolate and one each of Military Green and Honey
Yardage: About 900 yards — a bit less than I would have expected
Source: Vermont Beads and Fibers, Middlebury, Vermont
Needles: US 5 bamboo straight needles for body; US 4 bamboo circular needle for ribbing, button bands, and collar
Gauge: About 19 sts and 32 rows = 4″ in furrows pattern
Notes: Oh man, I love this sweater. It’s really warm and comfortable, but at the same time it’s rather sharp and tailored looking, which I think is the result of the nice frame for the color pattern that the solid-colored bands of ribbing, button bands, and sleeves create.

I call this my “Middlebury cardigan” because I got the yarn for it in Middlebury, Vermont, at the end of a bicycle vacation with my family this summer. (Come to think of it, my mom bought me the yarn as well as the buttons, so perhaps I ought to give her sponsorship credit.) The yarn was raised, dyed, and — I think — spun at Laughing Tree Farm in Vermont. Wearing the cardigan reminds me of my vacation and also makes me feel like a Vermonter: for whatever reason, it looks to me like the sort of thing one would wear to the Burlington farmer’s market on a Saturday morning. So that makes me happy.

For the most part, creating this sweater was fairly straightforward, but I did encounter a few challenges along the way. First, I chose a color pattern that pulls in vertically, which made it difficult to tell how long and how wide to knit the pieces so they’d settle out to the length and width I wanted. I used my swatch and a blocked front piece to figure this out, and it ended up not being a problem. I think the deep ribbing at the bottom, the bands, and the stockinette sleeves all help to stabilize the length.

While I was knitting the sleeves, I was a little nervous that I had settled on an upper arm width that was going to be narrower than I wanted given the slight looseness of the body (which has 2-3″ of positive ease) and the slightly oversized armholes (9″ deep). One day while I was jogging, I started thinking about whether there was a way to fix this problem without ripping back by picking up stitches along the sleeve edges and knitting for an inch or so before binding off. Then it occurred to me that I could make my sleeve insert into a design feature by using it to echo the pattern on the body. I was so enamored of this idea that I ended up trying it, even though it turned out that I didn’t really need the extra sleeve width after all. I knit the sleeves to the desired length to the underarm, picked up and knit in the color pattern along both edges, and later grafted the two new edges together in the middle. You can see the result here:

I’m tickled with how the inset carries the pattern onto the sleeves, and I’m thinking about other potential applications of the technique in future designs.

At the end, there was some button trauma. The main color I used here is called “Chocolate,” which would imply “brown,” but in most lights the sweater looks quite unmistakeably purple. I was looking for brown-purple buttons, but just about all the purple buttons out there seem to be more blue-purple. I did order some lovely buttons from Earthenwood Studio, but they didn’t end up being glazed dark enough to suit my purposes. I will hang onto them and try to design a different sweater to showcase them in the future. The buttons that my mom found aren’t the perfect color match, but they don’t compete with the sweater, and they’re just right in size and shape. The only problem is that she bought seven, and I need eight, and none of my e-mails to the button vendor are going through. Still, I figure that even one button shy of the full complement, I can call this sweater “finished,” since I’m finally able to wear it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 11:51 am and is filed under 2007 Collection, Design, Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.