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01/04/2006

purple wrap cardigan

In March of 2004, I decided to make my first sweater. I went out and bought six skeins of Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair, in Lupine. (This review of the yarn in Knitter's Review describes the color as blue, but it always looks more purple to me) My original intention was to make a sweater from the first Stitch 'n Bitch book, the one that talks about kool-aid dyeing yarn (a step I skipped).

I had only been knitting for a few months and because I was self-taught, and stubborn, I was still knitting waaay incorrectly. I don't even know how I did it, but whatever I was doing, purling HURT. Soon into the project, when I was a few inches in and probably way off in gauge, I decided to try something different. I tried Glampyre's free pattern for a raglan from the bottom-up, since it only required me to knit. I measured my gauge (using my flat swatch, I'm sure. I have never done a gauge swatch for knitting in the round, and don't ever intend to. I scoff at gauge swatches knit in the round.), did some calculations, and started knitting. I even made the sleeves flare a bit, like in the original Stitch 'n Bitch pattern.

Of course, this sweater turned out too big. I'd like to show you pictures, but they were lost in my computer's nervous breakdown a few weeks ago. Imagine a purple sweater, knit reasonably well, but too big for me. I never actually wore it. So I frogged the whole thing that summer and started working on a top-down raglan. It was kind of cute, you'll also have to do your best to imagine it, it had a square-ish neck with about an inch of ribbing, it never had sleeves, the body didn't really have shaping because I wanted it to be kind of big-ish but with many inches of ribbing along the bottom. Are you picturing it yet? I don't remember why that one got frogged. I think I couldn't figure out the sleeves. I tried to make them shaped like a shoulder, which was completely unnecessary, using my limited knowledge of short rows, and once they were a proper failure, the project disappeared again.

Next, I wanted to knit Freida. The yarn was way too expensive - Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk sells for maybe around $7 online, and for 15 balls...eek! I only spend that kind of money on...Haven. But those were in my early, crazy days. By now, it's the winter of 04/05 and I'm way smarter than that. So I decide to make up the pattern for Freida using my Mountain Mohair. It is to be my first time with set-in sleeves, and I don't understand them at all, and am working off no pattern whatsoever, and tend to give up when things don't work the first time. This is not exactly a recipe for success.

I used a horse-shoe cable, one I kind of like more than the braided one in the original sweater, and carefully measured my gauge and finished the front and back. Bored of cabling, I made the sleeves plain. In a miraculous turn of events, my sleeves fit in well enough on my first try. Of course, they looked awful. Saddle shoulders might be the word. Perhaps appropriate for another sweater, but not at all what I was going for. The sweater was too short, the fit was all wrong, and the sleeves were too wide at the top. I don't even know how this happened - I know exactly how wide I like my sleeves, so what was I doing making them a few inches wider?

A few weeks ago I decided to resurrect this purple yarn, which has now been made into 2 completed sweaters and 2 incomplete sweaters, with some parts of the yarn having been frogged a total of 4 times. It's scruffy and much softer than it used to be, and I knew I had to find a use for it. When I bought the latest IK last week, I found what I hope to be a final, perfect project for this yarn:

The cover sweater, the Ballet Wrap Cardigan. It's knit at 3 1/2 sts and 5 rows per inch, which is exactly the gauge I get with this yarn, after reknitting it so many times. It's a bit scruffy and cozy looking, which is all this yarn can hope to become at this point. I don't really know if I'll have enough of it for making both fronts, since so much yarn has been lost in the cutting of ends and seaming and all of that, but I figure I'll work the fronts last, and if I run out, I can just make it a pullover by making just one front the proper size, instead of 2 smaller ones. I'm kind of thinking I'll just do that anyway, actually...can I really manage those ties? I can knit them, sure, but they might be kind of annoying to use. We'll see. Here's what I have so far.





One sleeve, 1/2 done or so, and a close-up of those stitches. This yarn is so beautiful - purple-y blue with flecks of white, red, and blue. It makes for a nice change from working with Rowan Denim. The yarn isn't so stiff, I can knit it without looking, and it doesn't turn my hands blue. I've been working on it when I can't stand Haven anymore, and I think it will make good travel knitting. I don't know if/when I'll finish it, but it's a nice change from all my other unfinished objects.

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