Oh hey! I’ve just finished knitting a new jumper. Perfectly fluffy and perfectly relaxed and slouchy, the most wonderfully comfortable lounge-able thing you can imagine. This is the We Are Knitters sparkle raglan sweater, a design by Krysten Ritter, in the “sprinkle blue” colour way. It comes as a kit with everything you need to make it all packaged up neatly in a lovely brown paper bag. It’s was the absolute hugest treat to come home and find this on my doorstep! a really delightful present to cheer myself up during a sorta low spell.
And it was truly such a joy to knit! unply-ed, unspun “fleece type yarn and giant fat needles meant giant fat stitches too, so it knitted up super fast. Quick gratification, for sure.
And how beautiful are these wooden needles? They look so cool… so much prettier than my old metal ones. I wondered if they’d be a tinier bit “stickier” than metals; and yes they were, but not so much as to be annoying or a problem.
The yarn is We Are Knitters “the meriwool”; absolutely gorgeously squishy stuff!! 100% merino, and supposedly treated with a superwash treatment to make it machine-washable. This is awesome news because I already dropped a bit of chocolate on it… whoops! I didn’t risk the machine was yet though, I’m too frightened! I just gave it a spot hand-wash just very gently rubbing wool-wash into the chocolate-y smudge and the spot came out alright. When I do get brave enough to toss my sweater in the machine I’ll come back and update on whether this worked out just fine or whether it was disastrous… but I’ll be allowing myself a few more wears first, just in case!
So; there was a slightly negative thing with my kit… when I checked out the requisite five balls for my size I noticed that one ball was from a different dyelot than the other four. This one ball had noticeably less blue sparkles in it that the other four balls. Not too much of a problem, I thought; I’ll just use that one divided evenly over the sleeves; as in, two rows of the majority dyelot, two rows of the odd-one-out, and repeat; for each sleeve. This worked out ok, I think but as I was doing the front and back of the sweater I couldn’t help but notice that as well, one ball of the majority dyelot seemed to have considerably more blue in it that even its fellow three balls from the same dyelot. You can see this at the top of the sweater in the lower picture, below. It wasn’t obvious when you were looking at the balls together, but once I’d knitted practically the whole ball it did start to stand out a little bit.
above, I’m wearing it back to front compared to the below picture… the pattern front and back are exactly the same as each other so you can wear it either way, which I really like btw! I’ll probably wear it like the below picture because I prefer the way the sparkles appear on this side…
Oh, the other thing I’m posting about here is this skirt… this is the Sabrina skirt by Forget-me-not patterns that I made last year in a lovely orange-brown herringbone wool that Mum gave me once. I recently added pockets to this, as posted here, and now I’m posting it again to point out that I’ve shortened it too. This involved a fair amount of unpicking an intricately stitched walking vent, just so I could stitch up again closed. Lol, the things we do! However, I’m much happier with it this length. I really like my winter skirts to be on the shorter side, and realistically I’m never going to wear this thick woollen skirt in the warm weather! The other, hidden bonus is that initially I stitched the burgundy-coloured lining hem in orange thread, a. because it’s the thread I used to sew the skirt in and I couldn’t be bothered changing it, and b. I didn’t have any matching burgundy thread at the time anyway. Now I DO have some burgundy thread, so once I trimmed the lining I stitched the new hem in matching thread. Yay! for tiny good things!
Look, with regards to the uneven-sparkle issue with my sweater; it’s fine really: I’m not actually bothered because I’m really very happy with it, and I even like that the body is a touch more blue than the sleeves and therefore has a slight visual point of difference. Sometimes I’m a bit more obsessive about how an apparently random distribution of decorative elements can then appear not so random in the end result; a foible of the design process that a regular person probably wouldn’t even notice but which can at times send my weird brain into a frenzy of debate about whether I should unravel the whole thing and start again. However, I shall NOT do this, because I knit for joy, not self-flagellation… and I am content to just enjoy my sweater for what it is. Which is fluffy and warm and pretty and wonderful.
Details:
Sweater, the sparkle raglan sweater design by Krysten Ritter, in a kit from We Are Knitters
Rust skirt; the Sabrina pattern by Forget-me-not patterns in an old herringbone wool passed down by Mum? I think? shorted and with pockets added. initially posted here
Turquoise skirt; adapted Burda 2/2015;109 denim from my NYC holiday, details here
Black tights, my own design, black stretch polyester, details here
yeah, unless it was pointed out, which I JUST DID of course! you can’t even really tell in real life. I’ve really got to learn to not point these things out…
I made the matching onesie using my current favourite onesie pattern, Burda 9434. I made it using a scrap of cream coloured cotton jersey, and white plastic snaps, that I bought along with their matching tool from Spotlight. I don’t know why I haven’t used these before! because they really are far superior to the metal versions… I’m only sad that the white plastic did not take up the dye, like AT ALL. Oh yes, I obviously dyed the cream onesie to make it motley brown, like Yoda’s robes. I used dark brown thread so it would match the final colour.
It’s completely bizarre to be donning a pair of socks on a stifling hot day of 35C, which indeedy yes it is today, but I absolutely must! since I promised myself I’d knit a pair of socks for each month of this year, it’s the last day of January and I don’t want to be late!
I perused Le Stash, and my hand fell on some lovely garden-green raw silk, mainly because I knew I had a matching zip in my zip stash already too. The green silk turned out to be a pair of trousers, that Mum herself had originally give to me to use for fabric sometime. She’d originally bought them in Italy, while on holiday, and got many years of good use out of them. It occurred to me I could make a really good little project bag, utilising the trousers’ existing welt pockets and waistband… bonus that this lovely fabric is boomeranging its way back to Mum in a new, and newly useful form. Full circle! I selected some brushed tartan cotton for the bags’s lining, and inserted a new zip underneath the waistband facing inside, along with a wrist strap, so she can have the bag hanging from her wrist and still knit from it. I think the really interesting thing about the bag though is the accessories; I added three little tabs inside, two with swivel clips, to which I attached a pair of scissors, and a pack of wool needles, and the third has a D-ring to which I’ve sewn a tape measure. I left the original back welt pockets intact on the outside (above), so she can tuck small extra things into those pockets, things she might not want to go rattling around the inside of the bag.
