Some time ago (Ravelry tells me May 24, 2020), I started on a sweater meant to use up leftovers of Zeeman Tweed wool, the thick version. I had the body of a Marsala sweater basically finished and got stuck on the sleeves. It went into a box of doom for probably two years or so, never to be worked on again. In October of this year, I unraveled it all and started on a new leftover sweater. This time using the Nutmeg by Jenifer Stark.
It’s a fairly simple raglan sweater with the one design element being the roll over hems, made with 5 knit rows and one purl row. The original pattern was quite boxy, so I added some impromptu shaping in the sides and some sort rows to the back at the bottom. The original plan was to have all the hems in grey, and then alternate stripes of red, white, blue and green. About three stripes in I devised a new plan, to have main colour stripes (red, green, blue) that would all have white in between colour switches. It worked out quite well, but I had a literal mountain of ends to weave into the sweater. I dedicated long stretches of time to do this fairly regularly, knowing that if I didn’t do it immediately, the sweater was liable to go into another box of doom.
The body was finished first and then I completed the sleeves. At that point in time, I was wondering why the purl row at the bottom of the sleeves worked so well to stop further curling, but the one at the bottom of the sweater was doing nothing of the sort. Turns out, I’m still crap at counting and only did four rows before casting off. I undid all of that and knit an extra row. This seems to have helped a lot. Then it came time to do sweater surgery. Originally the neck was grey-blue-red, but the new white in the middle plan necessitated some adjustment. The neck was knit again, and then I matrass stitched it to the first row of the original red stripe. It took a while, but it worked out well. The last thing I did was to add a contrasting stitch in the back of the neck, so I can easily see how to put it on.
In the beginning I had 44 g of green, 136 g of blue, 101 g of white, 164 g of red, 79 g of grey and 27 g of black. At the end, there was no green anymore, 37 g of blue, 15 g of white and 15 g of red leftover and since I didn’t use any, still 79 g of grey and 27 g of black. All in all, a pretty good score. I think that leaving the grey out makes this a much brighter sweater. The grey really muted it. I think it’ll be easy to wear and we’ll see if I finally managed to make sleeves that are the right length. Something I’ve proven to be exceptionally bad at…
Next up, a hat as part of the leftover projects!
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