This was finished before Christmas and I planned to have this written up in January….never mind!
Once I had completed my first EZ yoked sweater I just wanted to do another one. I find that I just love colour work.
The colours of this jumper were inspired by a friend’s fair isle cardigan and I knew that I wanted a blue base. I chose to use an 100% wool yarn this time and chose a King Cole DK quality. It’s one of the less expensive all wool yarns, the sweater has had quite a bit of wear and does already look slightly pilled in areas so I’m not sure I would chose this again.
For the colour work design I copied a chart from a knitting magazine I had. I had been looking for inspiration on-line before I remembered seeing a fair isle design in the Aran pattern book I had bought the previous year.
But whilst looking on-line I came across this great resource for colour work designing. Chart Minder. I had printed out some squared paper for myself to fill in with my design fully expecting it to be quite time consuming. But with Chart Minder you can do it all on the computer – adding colours to the squares, inserting rows – deleting rows etc. It took a little bit of time to get used to, especially when trying to add a row in but I got there and printed out my design.
The design I created in Chart Minder
I found that the front neck on my first sweater was slightly too high so I counted how many rows of colour work were in that sweater and took off about 5 or 6 rows in the design for this one.
I was really happy with the fit on the body of the first sweater so I wanted to create the same size. I knitted a tension swatch but for some reason I decided to err on the side of caution and and added in a few extra stitches as I didn’t want it to be too small or if it shrunk when washed – which then once I knitted the body thought it was too wide – the circumference is around 3-4″ larger than the first sweater.
When knitting the colour work I did two rows of decreasing and I also knitted short rows across the back to to build up the neck. On my final row I did a little bit of decreasing on the back neck only. With regards to building up the back neck I read a post from Karen at Fringe Association where she mentions that if she knitted another colour work yoke sweater she would knit the short rows before the colour work. This would give you the look at the neck of the colour work pattern sitting the same distance underneath the rib all the way around. You can see from the picture below of my sweater that there is much more blue underneath the neck ribbing at the back. I don’t mind this but knitting the short rows under the yoke is an interesting idea.
Photo shows the building up of the back neck by working short rows across the back only.
I was on the home straight of knitting this when I suddenly went off it. I was annoyed with myself for knitting it too wide and then I also went off the colours I had chosen. My friends cardigan was lovely but I’m a different colouring and instead of thinking of what suited me I went for a group of colours that looked good together but not necessarily on me. There were a lot of ends to weave in and I nearly didn’t bother but I pulled myself together and got on with it!
OK, it’s note the fit I set out to knit and I need to wear a shirt underneath to give it the look I want and the colours have grown on me. It’s had loads of wear over the last few months and I wanted to start knitting another one straight away but I managed to control myself and maybe wait to later in the year in time for next autumn.
cut it out, stitch it up! 