I have finished a sweater! It is the Sides and stripes sweater by Veera Välimäki I mentioned in a previous post about the designer.
The design
The sweater is knit seamlessly in the round. The yoke is quite fitted but the body has lots of positive ease. There are short rows at the bottom of the back body to make the sweater a bit longer at the back. The sides are purled to make a reverse stockinette stitch. The hem of the body and sleeves are in garter stitch.
The yarn
The main colour yarn is the 3-ply finewool yarn I have been spinning during august. It’s spun woolen from hand-carded rolags on my spinning wheel. I’m really happy with the result. I spin lots of 2-ply and like the result, but 3-ply is just so round and beautiful!
I dyed it in a jeansy colour. As usual, I’m way too cheap when I dye, so I try to press too much yarn into a pot that is too small, resulting in an uneven dye. But I do love the result, it gives the yarn a variegated finish.
For the constrast colour I used a 2-ply yarn spun woolen from the fold on a supported spindle. I dyed it in a warm, dark orangy shade.
The orange yarn is thinner than the blue, but since the sweater is striped it doesn’t really matter, the difference just adds texture to the striped section.
The knitting
Knitting was just a pleasure. There is a lot of stockinette, but the stripes and the reverse stockinette sides make the knitting more interesting. When I got to the sleeves I feared that there wouldn’t be enough blue yarn. I decided to knit both sleeves at the same time to avoid ending up with different length sleeves. When the sleeves were not at all finished, I ran out of yarn. I did have one undyed skein left though, and the dye. I figured, that if I managed to dye the last skein in a similar colour, I could get away with it. If I didn’t, I had to solve the problem somehow.
The setback
I dyed the last skein, and it ended up a clear moss green colour. I have had some problems with this dye, I had added some yellow to it earlier to make a turquoise shade, but somehow the yellow didn’t show. But now I found it, in the last skein. There was no way I could use it for the hem of the sleeves. So I knit 9 of the 12 garter stitch rows for the hem in the final meters of the blue yarn. Then I made a turned hem. I knit a purl row of orange and continued in stockinette stitch for 8 rows and cast off while at the same time fastening the bind-off to the wrong side of the sweater. To do this, I used a smaller needle to pick up the purl bumps on the inside of the garment, just at the height of the fold. From that I made a 3-needle bind-off. This way I used as much as possible of the blue yarn (and there were only inches left of it after the garter stitch hem) and still got a nice finish of the sleeves.
Happy happy!