Hello Internet Friends
Today I’m super stoked to share my latest knitting project, finished just in time for the summer weather to hit vancouver lol (it seriously hit 25 degrees C here on the weekend! Crazy weather for May!) But even though it’s gotten warm here quite quickly I’m sure I’ll still get some decent use out of this cozy, cropped, tee shirt sweater before the real summer hits! (Of course the day I decide to take blog photos it ends up being overcast and rainy, so sorry for the kind of grainy photos since my lighting was off, but the grey moodiness adds to the fuzziness of the mohair in the sweater I feel!)
I’ve been having a thing with mohair in the last few months, as evidenced from my other two recent knitted makes, linked here and here. So when Pompom Quarterly released their spring 2020 edition with the theme of air and pretty much ALL mohair related project I was IN! I managed to pre order a copy through my local yarn shop, WetCoast Wools, but had to wait until after my Bali trip to pick it up. Since I had been coveting the patterns since they were announced I immediately knew that the first pattern I wanted to knit was Aubade by Nataliya Sinelshcikova. As I was already at the store to pick up my copy of the magazine, I took the opportunity to poll my fellow Monday Knit Night members on which colour combo to choose and settled on this denim blue/golden yellow combo (although I still have pics of the running up colour combo which I am tempted to pick up and knit as well!). Nothing like a knitting hive mind to help you with colour selections! Plus it helps when one of the names of the colours you selected is croissant, you just have to buy it at that point, and then also an actual croissant because them’s the rules!
The construction of this sweater is pretty interesting, it uses a combination of changing needle sizes with increase rows for the yoke. This actually proved a bit challenging as right after picking up the magazine and yarn we went into lockdown, and I didn’t realize that I didn’t have US1.5 or US 2.5 needles! I did a quickie swatch and determined that if I went up a needle size for each of the 4 recommended needles I would end up off gauge by a single stitch and that the way the fabric came together was really nice so I decided to roll with it. I have all the details about the needle sizes and yarn that I used on my Ravelry project page linked here.
This sweater was a great combination of pattern work with some mindless ‘miles of stockinette’ mixed in which was really great for this start of ‘work from home’ it was interesting enough to keep me going while also mindless enough to do while participating in long conference calls/meetings (honestly I pay much more attention when my hands are occupied while sitting in a meeting! I know I’m not the only one that benefits from a bit of meeting knitting!)
While it did knit up quite quickly The part that I did stall at was finishing the hems….for this pattern you finish up the stripe repeat then knit two rows with a much smaller needle size and then graft that last row of live stitches to the back of the last stripe to create a kind of rolled hem. Since I really like the way this hem looked on the sample sweaters I had no choice but to try it out myself! The downside is that it takes forever since you are basically hand stitching the entire last row! Now since I normally like to use a tubular cast off I’m no stranger to essentially hand sewing a bind off but with this it was just really fiddly since you were trying to ensure that the edge of the hem would be the last stripe and the whole things is curling on itself because it hadn’t been blocked yet! I eventually made it to the end then remembered that I needed to do the same bind off on the sleeves lol!
Speaking of blocking, because the hems rolled so much it was super important to AGGRESSIVELY BLOCK the sweater when it was done so that it would hang nicely. I was really glad that I had happened to pick up some Knitter’s Pride Knitblockers which are essentially combs with pins instead of regular comb teeth. This made making a very straight hem easy and allowed me to put enough tension on the hem that it blocked beautifully!
I’m really pleased with how this sweater turned out! I knit a size 2 and the only modification was to lengthen it by ~1.5” since I liked the slightly longer length. I really am temped to knit a second one with the other colourway but I already have yarn lined up for two more projects from this edition of the magazine! One of which is already almost done! Huzzah for quarantine knitting! Hope to share those projects with you guys soon! Meantime stay safe out there!