knitting

I have revamped the website! It looks super cool, like a blog from 2008.

MEANWHILE, I’ve also been working on some sweater ideas. Sweater design feels like a bit of a luxury compared to cowls or hats, even though it’s often what I’d like to be doing—it takes so much more time, and so much more yarn, and that’s just to knit a sample to get the idea down. And you have to know how arms work. Like. How they usually attach to the body. Where they come out. Etc.

Starling Sweater. The photo shows a half-view of a half-finished cardigan. The yarn is grey wool, a little rustic. Bamboo double-pointed knitting needles stick out of the fabric of a sleeve in progress.

It’s about as slow as fashion can be, short of owning the sheep and starting from there.

ANYWAY, in the meantime, while I hope to have 2+ larger designs ready to finish out the year, there will be a few new smaller projects during the holidays! I’ll be wrapping up a cowl and a possible hat in the next few days. (I have finished the cowl, and you can knit your own (link goes to Ravelry design page). The hat is under review. I am not certain about it.)

knitting · pattern · photo posts · wool

Yes! New Cardigan & Hat.

This is Caddis Cardigan. It’s knit in sportweight yarn—most of the samples are Malabrigo Arroyo, which is kind of a favorite of mine. (It’s soft, with a nice tonal quality to the dyeways. I think they’ve moved from having dyelots to not, which is probably fair and for the best since there’s a limit to how consistent skeins dyed this way will be even if they’re all from the same batch, but I still want to make a basic pullover for myself from it someday.)

This is a very versatile sweater/vest sort of thing. If you close the front using a shawl pin or similar (it has no attached buttons), it looks very tailored and smart. If you leave it free, it’s very flowing. The shapes are geometric and the cardigan vest overall is slightly asymmetrical, but the eyelets line up.

The shaping is unique! Knitting is easy for the first part, and then requires a little more focus at the end. But once it’s done—and it’s mostly done when you finish knitting; there are no true seams— there are so many options for wearing the finished piece: thick collar, slim collar, no collar, long, or (flipped) cropped with a broad square collar.

Oh, and there’s also a new hat design .PDF up! It’s an okay hat-hat, but a pretty cute baby hat.

So that’s it for October, so far. Pumice Hat and Caddis Cardigan/Vest/Thing.