Hello Internet Friends!

I had a CRAZY October/early November so please excuse the lack of posts but that crazy time allowed me to fully dig into my Knit City 2019 stash and knit up my first planned project, a daydreamer sweater! If you’ve been lurking my instagram (@beccamadethat) you’ll have seen some of my pictures from this year’s Knit City as well as my yarn haul and planning bullet journal page. Number one on that planning page were plans for a daydreamer sweater, by Andrea Mowry. I fell in love with this pattern when she released it a short while ago and I knew it was going to fly to the top of my Knit City planning list.

I had a ton of fun scoping out all of my potential knitting options for this project at all the vendors at this year’s show, but I kinda had a feeling that I would probably choose a colourway from yarn Ink since I loved knitting with their Monet colourway that I got at last year’s show (speaking of which I really need to blog that sweater….I have pictures of it from our Japan trip…adding to the blogging list!). I settled on Yarn Ink’s Knit City exclusive colourway, Polaroid, on their classic sock base, which has this lovely pale pink base specked with pops of navy, pink and orange. For the lace mohair I chose Vivid yarn studio’s Surisilk Lace in the Harmony colourway. I hadn’t done a mohair based project before so I was a bit nervous about the mohair becoming knotted in the skein to ball of yarn balling process or while knitting but I think since this mohair had a good bit of silk in it everything was smooth sailing. The addition of the mohair does soften the crisp colours of the main fingering weight yarn a smidge, but I really loved the overall halo effect and these two colourways are so well matched that they really look like they came from the same dyer.

I was so excited to knit this pattern partially because of the bobbles!! I am firmly team bobbles for knitware with the caveat being that the bobbles must be used responsibly, meaning that the bobbles shouldn’t look too weird (ahem no weird boob placed bobbles please!) and the bobbles shouldn’t interfere with the wearing of the sweater. For example putting bobbles on the side seam would mean they rub against your arm a bunch and would be an irresponsible use of bobbles! In my opinion the daydreamer sweater has done bobbles right! there’s a clear pattern for the bobbles which helps prevent any weird boob bobble issues! AND I really liked learning this technique for bobbles created with a crochet hook! These bobbles look like tiny hand wrapped balls of yarn and are very structured, none of this semi flat bobble nonsense typically seen with knit bobbles.

As with all of Andrea’s patterns the instructions were well written :D I didn’t make any changes to the pattern, I knit a size 3 (48” final bust circumference, giving me 10.5” of positive ease). This sweater is truly a cropped sweater and I probably could have gotten away with adding an additional half chart of the pattern repeat and it would still have looked pretty good on me, but as it stands it hits just below my natural waist and gives a very flattering effect. I did have some trouble making the back of the neckband, I didn’t end up knitting the two sides even so the center seam of the neckband isn’t at the center back of the sweater but it’s not very noticeable. I may go back and attempt to fix this, however, since I think I ended up being a bit too generous with the neck band so the neck is a bit loose. In the pattern Andrea notes that you can have a closer fit at the neck by knitting the back portion of the neckband a little smaller, I’m going to wear my sweater a bit and see if I really want to change it. The only other two knitting notes I would like to mention is that I did change skeins of the fingering weight yarn every 2 rows or so to prevent any colour pooling of the speckled portions, I also had about 1.5 skeins of the worsted weight yarn left over from the amount I purchased based upon the suggested yardage in the pattern (which means I get to make matching socks!! yay!!) My final yardage totals can be found on my ravelry page for this project here.

I think one of the hardest parts about knitting a cropped sweater like this is to find ways to style it, in the images of me wearing the sweater I am styling it super casually with a RTW tank top and leggings. Thanks to my lucky win of a dress form at this year’s Vancouver Frocktails I can actually try out the sweater with a few different shirt options! In the gallery above I’ve styled it 3 ways, first with a long sleeved plantain tee that I recently made (I actually wore this combo to work recently and it was so nice and cozy in my cold corner of the office!), the second is with a simple woven tank pattern called Clark from Seamwork Magazine, for the third it’s paired with one of my favourite matcha tops and I really like how the collar of the matcha pairs with the wide neckline of the sweater! (the last photo is another close up of the bobbles because I love them!). It was really fun to play with the styling by playing dress up with my dress form, it was an easy way to try out some new ideas without getting caught up in looking at what my body looks like vs what the styling looks like.

I hope you enjoyed this post and think about giving a cropped sweater a try! And also knitting with mohair a try! I really love the fabric that was created by knitting the fingering weight and mohair together, fingers crossed that my next mohair project goes just as smoothly ;)