I wish I could say I got this done during the quarantine, but nope. Here we're not yet at the point where non-essentials are closed yet, unlike sensible countries. So from my need to wind down after daft shifts, a sweater was born.
It all started when we visited the same ol' Titityy in Jyväskylä, the cutest yarn store I've seen in these lands. We were walking past walls and walls of indie dyed skeins and something caught my attention...
Maybe because it looked like a metallic tone of grey, who knows. I usually only wear dark colours.
So I thought I'll buy a sweater quantity and find a pattern afterwards (thing I swore never to do to keep my stash to a minimum. So much for that!)
Later on I discovered stranded colourwork designs by Jennifer Steingassand fell in love with just about everything she'd made. I went for it, and got a contrast colour for the yoke bit,
Some lightly varigated dark purple.
And hop, I cast on. The pattern is super easy to understand, it's got videos linked to show some techniques, and once you embark on the colourwork journey, the knitting becomes rhytmic and hard to put down, I would have worked on it for hours and hours straight, if it wasn't for my hand saying nope after a while.
So in no time, we went from this:
To this:
That picture was taken right after I separated the sleeves ffrom the body. The yoke was done, what I had in front of me was hours worth of plain stockinet stitch ahead. I love this, I can just knit away while spacing out, listening to podcasts, whatever. It's meditative.
I went for the long sleeve version. I'm just not sure what's the use of a merino jumper if my arms are going to be left in the cold...
Well I learned some things whilst doing the colourwork on the sleeves.
First of all, it's pretty. It binds the whole look together.
Second of all: Fuck. Stranded work. On double-pointed needles. When you don't know what you're doing yet.
I ended up liking making the second sleeve, but the first one was a bloody disaster that I had to rip out once or twice before the "ahhh" moment.
And here we have it, after a not-too-aggressive steam blocking to relax and even out the stitches, the final product. The reason I hesitate to give it a good wet block is the multitude of horror stories I read about Madelinetosh yarns bleeding like crazy. To pay this price for yarn and still having to pre-wash it ourselves... pff.
I share this project with a half portion of humbleness, and a half portion of pompous pride flowing out of my... well anyway.
Technicalities~
Pattern: Newleaf by Jennifer Steingass
Yarn: Skein Queen in Crush
Colourway: Abbey Ruins
Yarn: Madelinetosh in Tosh Merino Light
Colourway: Eleven Dark
Now I'm working on a Clapotis scarf. Not as exiting as a whole garment in my biased opinion, but it's been on my wishlist for as long as I've been knitting.
