I first saw this wonderful sweater on Natalie Wilson’s Iknitiative website when I was browsing through it last spring. My niece Diane, who was knitting some of Natalie’s patterns, turned me onto her site. Later in the summer when I visited my mom for her 85th birthday in Houghton Lake Michigan, my niece and I escaped for a bit of yarn-bonding and retail therapy at Arnies. Have you ever been to Arnie’s? Ok, I’m digressing a bit, but it IS my blog…
I’m from the SF Bay Area in California. I am used to stores for EVERYTHING. I have been to Mall of America, and frankly, it ain’t nothin’ compared to the Santana Row/Valley Fair complex in San Jose. And we have cool yarn shops all over the place here. And I haven’t even mentioned San Francisco! But Arnies? For an Arnies, you have to go to Houghton Lake, in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan. When I lived in Houghton Lake as a kid, Arnies was one small corner shop in a row of various stores, and now it IS the entire block of shops– a series of contiguous rooms that you can wander through in a craft-dazed wonder. As my husband pointed out, it’s the perfect shop for a place like Houghton Lake, because there isn’t much else to do there, so you can take up painting, framing, knitting, woodwork, embroidery, knitting… did I mention knitting?
So I spotted the Noro Iro yarn that Natalie used for her sweater, Noro Iro #43. It felt a bit "bright" for me, although as I write this and look at the pattern picture, I kind of wonder if I didn’t chicken out. It’s so lively. In any case, I went with the more muted tones of #57. So, without any further ado, here’s the finished sweater!
My Experience with the Pattern
If you decide to buy/download Natalie’s pattern, which is really easy to do, btw, you might want to look over my comments if you are an intermediate knitter. I wouldn’t recommend this pattern for a beginner.
- m1 This was the first time I had encountered "Make one increase" in a pattern. Because I couldn’t seem to get it right without putting a hole in the fabric, I just knit once in the front and once in the back for my increase. Had I looked at page 15 of my Vogue Knitting Quick Reference, I would have found a very easy visual guide to this stitch. But be careful! If you haven’t done an M1 increase before, practice this on your swatch. You must learn to twist the yarn so there is no hole in the sweater.
- Wrap and turn for short rows. I also had never knitted "short rows" before, and while this was a bit mystifying to me at first, I found the instructions easy to follow and the results as intended in the pattern. Now, I realize that the short row technique is a way to create an extension to one edge of knitting where the extension spans only partly across the edge. In this pattern, the sleeves and shoulders are created using this technique, for a more fitted effect.
- Button Holes. Very cool, very easy to make following the pattern instructions. Note that in the sweater, I used the recommended button size of 1′ or more in diameter. It might seem that a 2-stitch button hole is too small for this size button, but, it’s perfect.
- Side shaping. I’d test this out on a big swatch if you’re hoping for a more fitted sweater. This was definitely one of my "lessons learned" about knitting from a pattern.
- Sleeve assembly. This one was really tough for me because at first the only instructions I could find on slip stitch crochet was in Interweave magazine. I just didn’t get this at first, until I found wonderfully clear instructions at the back of the Twisted Sisters Knit Sweaters book. In fact, the whole seaming reference at the back of this book is really great. In the Twisted Sister’s book, they show how to do a crochet chain seam stitch on two bound-off edges, but it’s the same principle when joining the open stitches of the seam to the bound-off shoulder inset.
Tips
- Don’t snug up on the sleeve assembly! See in the picture above how the shoulders are a little too tight looking compared to the body? If I were to do this again (and I won’t), I would purposefully make sure my crochet chain was somewhat loose.
- When connecting the sleeves with a long length of yarn, don’t try anything but a crochet chain stitch, since the Noro Iro is too fragile a yarn to handle the constant friction when worked the traditional way.
- Pay attention to how the self-striping plays out with this kind of yarn, and start a new skein for each major section. When I re-worked this sweater again, I made sure that certain colors appeared in each block. The first time through, the left panel was all browns and green, and didn’t coordinate well with the rest of the sections, in my opinion.
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