Knitting – Page 6 – Hopefully Creative

Second Try Sweater

Sometimes you just have to give up and accept that some yarn will just not be for you. So I made my friend a sweater.

I started knitting a sweater called Fallen Leaves by Andrea Yetman in January, using some green yarn and some grey yarn. By the time I came to just below the leave pattern it just seemed very big. Since there weren’t any other sizes to really choose from, I decided to frog it. I had made the deal with myself that I could start knitting with my starry night yarn after I finished this green yarn, so I had to find another project.

So I cast on a new sweater, this time Cadence by Jordana Paige. I didn’t use the yarn specified in the pattern so I knit a larger size with smaller yarn, hoping that it would eventually fit me. By the time I had divided for the arms, I figured out that it both didn’t fit me and that I wouldn’t have liked wearing it even if it did fit. Almost off the shoulder just isn’t my jam. However, I wasn’t inclined to frog this again, because of that deal. So I asked a friend if she liked it so far and whether I could finish it for her. She did and so I kept on knitting.

I knit all of the body and then cast off but didn’t cut the yarn. I had her try it on and it was a little short, so I used all the yarn that was remaining to knit some extra length. I still like the idea of this, with the diamond shapes. I just couldn’t see myself wearing it at all, even if I had frogged it and made it smaller. Luckily, my friend is quite happy with the results of this project so that’s very nice. I’ve now cast on the starry yarn and am looking forward to finishing that sweater. Even if it will be very winter in the middle of summer.

Baby Bear Wear

Tiny sweater that probably will not fit.

This post was written on September 9, 2020 as I’d finished the project by then but couldn’t gift it because.. I had to wait for the baby. It’s since been gifted and therefore this post can go live.

Friends of mine are having a baby in December (turns out it was January), so I wanted to make some things. This is the first in what might just become a series. Baby things need very little yarn and fabric because they are so small, so that is quite handy.

I decided that I wanted to knit some sort of sweater, so off to Ravelry I went. The pattern that I went with is called Teddy Bear Sweater by Marta Porcel. The yarn was Zeeman Sophia in the Antra colourway. I used 62 grams of it to finish this little sweater. It was quite a quick knit too, started at 9:30 and finished all the knitting at 4:00. Then I assembled it the next day and embroidered the face onto the front. I’m debating whether it will actually fit because I have 0 sense of how big babies are and the sleeves look quite tight. If it doesn’t fit, that would be a little sad. However, I still enjoyed myself creating it which I think is an important aspect.

Baby stuff part 1 (wrong, seems it’s part 4), completed!

Whale Hat

A newborn hat but with a whale’s tail.

I finished the quilts for the new addition and just kept on making things.. One day I felt like knitting so I ravelry’d.. ravelried (?) around trying to find a baby hat. I found one with a whale-tail called
Little Whale Tail Newborn Hat by Amy O’Holleran. I thought it very appropriate considering the first quilt and the tiny baby socks with a whale on that I found in a shop.

So I took some yarn in the same colour as the socks and knit it up. It wasn’t very difficult and for once I chose to use double pointed needles instead of circulars. I did use some of the helpful comments of people who had already made it to figure out how to do the tail. It’s easy once you understand it.

I sort of really love it and am wondering if I should just knit one for myself, but I probably won’t.

Seattle Plaid Sweater

After two years, there will finally be more plaid clashing in my wardrobe!

My Ravelry notes say that I started this project on July 16, 2018 *gulp*. Whoops, that was quite a while ago. There were lots of delays along the way. Some had to do with my arm injury that was preventing me from knitting as much as I liked. Others were because of pure laziness, to be honest. On to the story..

So I used another free pattern from Ravelry: Seattle by Leah Swindon. From reading my Ravelry notes, I didn’t completely follow the pattern. I don’t remember much because the knitting was completed a good long while ago. I do remember that I made a significant colour change and that was too also add the yellow horizontal stripe along the body and not just the sleeves. I apparently stopped knitting some time between 2018 and May 2019 when I noted something about restarting the sleeves. Then the project remained in a bin for about another year. You see, with adding in those yellow stripes, it meant that I had so many ends to bind off. I don’t like binding off ends, so I procrastinated for a very long while.

When my mom came to visit, I showed her this knitting project and a few others that are also still languishing in bags, boxes or bins. She said that she would be willing to bind off the ends if I put the sweater together. So I took that challenge and sewed the thing together, since all the pieces had been completed ages ago already. She then set to binding it all off and I got my finished sweater on August 29, 2020, over two years since starting the project. Not going to lie, I’m very happy that it now gets to take up space in my closet and no longer in my unfinished projects pile.

I don’t own that many plaid that can fill the sweater role. So I’m very happy to add this to my wardrobe and see if I can plaid clash some more in my life. I like the spiral on the front and that was fun to knit. Trying to figure out how to get the yellow across the spiral wasn’t the easiest, but I think it worked out. This sweater is also remarkably warm, so it’s probably going to be in use this fall/winter. I’m looking forward to it!

Snowy Suspender Sweater

Making a cropped snow white sweater to go with my new replacement red pants or suspenders.

After finishing the replacement pants, I needed something to wear with it. Since it’s not generally summer anymore, I figured that if I wanted to continue to wear it, I’d need some sort of sweater. So I hatched an abbreviated plan…

The plan involved making a sweater that was shorter than all my other sweaters. One that wouldn’t bunch under my dungarees. A secondary purpose would be that I could also wear this sweater with suspenders, hopefully. While suspenders are awesome, sometimes wearing them over clothes is difficult because the item is too long. Then you get a lot of bunching and other less flattering situations. So I bought some nice and thick white yarn, and located an interesting pattern on Ravelry.

I settled on the 157-29 Virginia by DROPS design, and then heavily modified it. My gauge was off and I knew that I have no love for the enormously long armholes that DROPS seems to have, so I recalculated everything from the neckline down. I did keep the A.1 pattern intact as the raglan because that was the defining feature of this sweater and why I chose it in the first place. Once I reached the point where I needed to split for the arms, I decided that I wanted to continue some form of the A.1 pattern in the sleeves as well as the body. In the end I made sure to have two instead of three columns in the body and one in the sleeves.

The sleeves were the first to be completed as I wanted to make sure I had enough yarn to finish them. Then I continues with the body, in contrast to the pattern I only decreased a little but not increased. Then it came time to start the hem and I remembered a frogged project that had a split hem. So I put on a pair of my favourite suspender-requiring pants and determined where the splits were supposed to be. Two in the front and one in center back. By some miracle I managed to have numbers of stitches for all three of the sections that allowed me to do 2×2 rib with 3 stitches of knit at both ends.

I’m very happy with the way this turned out. I’ve worn it with both the red pants and suspender pants and it does the job I want it to do. It’s so nice and cozy and warm. Even if it is white and I did manage to pull a thread by getting stuck on something in my house at one point (luckily that was easily fixed). I haven’t yet managed to get spaghetti sauce or something else horribly staining on it yet, so that’s an achievement!

Mud Holes

After finishing the Snow Season sweater, I immediately cast on the same sweater (Mud Season by Elizabeth Smith) in grey. The plan was to create a sweater with holes in a wrap around pattern and fix the fit issue of the Snow Season.

I started out by plotting my holes in an excel sheet to figure out where I wanted them to be and how far apart they needed to go. Then I got on with the knitting. I got stuck just below the bottom holes on the front because I wasn’t sure how long the sweater needed to be and was too lazy to put it on and see how long it already was. It took me a few weeks to get myself back into action and determine that it was already long enough and just needed ribbing. I chose 1×1 twisted knits rib for the bottom and finished my skein with that.

The neckline is improvised, it’s a collar with 1×1 twisted knits rib with short rows to fill out the neckline. When I started on the sleeves, I decided they needed a spiral holes pattern too. It gave knitting the sleeves a little more interest and kept me motivated. I did have to rip out a quarter of a sleeve when I figured out that I’d miscounted at some point. However, that didn’t dampen my spirits since I was in the train (with the cactus facemask) and felt it was a good use of my time.

I enjoy wearing this sweater. Even if the holes are not very obvious from any form of distance, I know that they are there and that is the most important part. What I didn’t take into account when making all the holes, was that there would be one on each sleeve that would fall DIRECTLY on my elbow. When I first put my elbow down on the table and it was, cold, I was very shocked. Still, it doesn’t bother me really and I think it’s quite funny even. I look forward to wearing this one more often.

Linen Stitch

I’ve had my eye on a particular skein of yarn for quite a long while now. It was yellow moving into grey/purple and white every so often. I couldn’t figure out what to make from it, because doing a sweater would make another racoon. However, it was calling to me and calling to me and eventually I gave in. I bought it and sought a pattern that would fit. In the end, I turned to the Chickadee Cowl, a one-skein bulky linen stitch cowl.

Cast on using the drunken German cast on and got to work. It’s a very easy but satisfying stitch and can be worked quite fast. It took me about a week of rows here and there to finish it. I’m not entirely sure how to wear it, but it is quite nice and I really like the colours. I know it’s a little late in the season for something like this, as Spring is definitely here, but sometimes you just have to be anachronistic.

Snow Season

While Spring has officially started a few days ago, I got the itch to do something with snow at the beginning of March. This paved the way for the Snow Season sweater.

It started a while ago when I’d purchased the yarn for the Pocket Coatigan. I got some more in different colourways; 3 balls of blue and 2 of white. I’d thought about making some sort of dual coloured sweater. The exact plan was not decided. So I went off to scour Ravelry some more. I stumbled across a sweater called Scatter by Þórunn Vilmarsdóttir. While I liked the idea of a gradation in my sweater, I didn’t exactly like the execution. So I continued to search for a raglan base in the correct gauge, which I found in Mud Season by Elizabeth Smith.

The cast on was on March 2 (this is the project description), and this was a very quick knit with size 5.5 mm needles and quite thick yarn. Just below the division for the arms, I started incorporating some white yarn. There was some vague rhyme and reason to the design but the plan was to make it look random. At some point I decided to reverse back to blue and did the whole snow storm again. For the arms, I wanted to end those with the white too, so I snowed the bottom. Once it was finished, I wore it for a day and the sleeves shrunk by at least 5 cm. So I took out the ribbing, added more white and then redid the ribbing. I’d already taken pictures, so just imagine more white at the bottom of the sleeves and it’ll be fine. Funnily enough, the length as I wear it is now exactly the same as in the pictures. It’s just that it doesn’t migrate to above my wrist when worn for some time.

So far it’s nice to wear. I like the little holes and it just makes me happy. Once I finished the original, I cast on the same pattern again. Now in grey. I hope to incorporate some of the changes that came out of the first version and then we’ll see if I can get this one finished in less than two weeks. With the travel time to work reduced to zero, there may be some options..

Pocket Coatigan

Recently, I discovered that some of my all time favourite yarns was brought back into production. The Tweed yarn by Zeeman had returned! I’ve used it in the past for classics such as the leaves sweater, the striped sweater, the eighties revival sweater and the eyelet sweater. Once I brought back a bunch of yarn in three different colours, I discovered that the yardage per 100 grams was less than the original. I also determined that the red yarn I bought was exactly the same the eyelet sweater…

Once I’d discovered this, I still set out knitting a red top. The first try was using a pattern called Gardner by Amanda Keep Williams. While I did like the idea of this sweater, I got about halfway when I decided that I didn’t like it nearly enough. I don’t tend to wear cropped anything, so it was a bad choice to start with. So I frogged the whole thing and set out on search for another pattern. I ended up with the pocket coatigan by Originally Lovely, a free pattern available on their site.

According to my Ravelry notes, I set out knitting the coatigan on the 25th of January. That means it’s taken me a little over a month to finish. Quite decent if I say so myself. The knitting is straightforward. I made a few small changes along the way. There were a few extra decreases in the sides to attempt some shaping (not sure if that helped at all), and somehow my stitch count at the neck edge was off. I’m unsure how it’s possible to knit the size S with the stitch counts they give, because they don’t add up according to my math, but perhaps I’m wrong. So I winged the neckline a little.

I haven’t worn it out yet, nor have I done any blocking (not that I’m planning on doing that anyway), so I’m unsure how this will hold up. The sleeves are a little long, but that’s because this yarn tends to shrink on me lengthwise, which means that practically none of my Tweed sweaters have arms that are over bracelet length. It does have pockets, which admittedly were the main attraction for me. Now I just need to see if I will voluntary pick a sweater from my cupboard that doesn’t closes, if not, I may still add some form of closure to make it more wearable. But yay! I finished a thing!

Christmas Knit Gifts

This post was written a while ago, but the post has made me wait until one of the gifts arrived in New Zealand, that took a while..

Poinsettia

When I was making and sending my Christmas cards, I wanted to include a little gift for a friend of mine who is currently in New Zealand. She’s bought poinsettias for the past few years and managed to keep them alive through to July or so, so I decided to make one for her to see if the Christmas spirit transfer. Sadly my card hadn’t arrived yet by Christmas, so I don’t know if it worked.

The free pattern for this little flower was found on Ravelry – it’s the knitted poinsettia by June Gilbank. It has you make six large green leaves, six smaller red leaves and some yellow stem bits. I ignored the stem bits and chose to do some french knots instead. This was a very quick knit and quite easy to put together. I liked the way she finished the back with a knot and very limited weaving of ends.

Friend of the Forest hood

The second gift was a hood – the friend of the forest hood by Gretchen Tracy. I’d been wanting to knit a hood like this for a while now and when I found some lovely ‘printed yarn’ (?), I decided to go for it. However, I was also making a very red coat at the time. I wouldn’t be able to wear this hood with it because it would clash something horrible. So I decided to gift the hood to a colleague who enjoys these types of fall colours.

It knit up real easy and quick. I still have the last two colours of the ball left (grey and some more purple) and another ball but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. So I guess that’ll be a story for another day.

Category: Knitting