Saturday, September 17, 2011

for now, that's good enough for me

Here's the finished version of that sweater from a few weeks ago. I still have a ways to go in making my floats actually float, but I'm enjoying this nonetheless. It's the Paper Dolls pattern, with the yoke pattern borrowed from Spilly Jane's quo vadis mittens.

While I quite love many of Kate Davies' designs (all that beautiful colorwork!) (and lovelies without colorwork!), I hadn't thought much about this particular design until I saw her blog post about all the different custom yokes. (Go read it! But only if you want to find yourself slightly obsessed with the idea of knitting a paper dolls, too.) Two particularly caught my attention: a beautiful adaptation of a mitten pattern to sweater size; and one featuring an animal that has always been dear to my heart. (Respectively, on Ravelry, those are andiknit's Paper Flowers Pullover and jettshin's Paper Dolls-Hedgehog Version.)

I wanted something a little more subdued for my first attempt, so I had my mind set on replicating the Paper Flowers Pullover. However, the Plucky Knitter just kept sending classics that I liked with my background color. And I couldn't quite picture how to adapt that pattern to be multi-colored.
Luckily, knitting the body of the sweater gave me a long time to dither about yoke options. I finally decided to go with the quo vadis pattern as I was packing for a week's vacation and needed to print out *some* pattern to work from. The quo vadis pattern led to some interesting decreases during the yoke, since it does not have large sections of background color to hide the decreases. Nonetheless, I'm quite happy about the end result and think it is very wearable.

All the yarn used is the Plucky Knitter Primo Fingering, in Hoity Toity (main color), Memories (the purple), Backwards and in High Heels (the teal), and Sterling. (All but Sterling were Plucky Classics.) I could have finished this sweater with just two skeins of Hoity Toity, but I wanted to make it longer than the pattern suggested. So, about 3/4 of the way through the body, I purchased an extra skein through an ISO on Ravelry. The new skein was much more rust-colored than the skeins I already had, but I alternated skeins, so I don't think that you can tell the difference.
However, I neglected to do so during the short row shaping at the back neck, so it turned out much more rust-colored than the rest of the sweater, as you can sort-of see in the picture of the back. (To my credit, it's harder to alternate skeins when you're doing short rows because you never get back to your other skein. However, if I had thought it through, I would have used one of the other skeins for the short row section.)

One note about the primo: it's a dream to knit with but blocks out very large! I have found that I need to put this sweater into the dryer to get it back to normal size, but it also fuzzes in the dryer. I've defuzzed most of the sweater, but it is definitely something that I'll plan for in any future primo sweaters.

Given how much I enjoyed knitting this sweater, and how I look forward to wearing it this fall, I expect that there's another one with hedgehogs not too far in my future.

3 comments:

Elizabeth said...

SO PRETTY! As is the hair of that lovely model you have showing off the sweater for us.

I also cannot wait for hedgies. OMG, so adorable.

HEB said...

Thanks, kid. You know, we could do a hedgehog-a-long next spring....

(Because all of our KALs have been so successful!)

Elizabeth said...

hedgehog-a-long!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sigh. Talk about unrealistic knitting.