Knitty Couture

This sweater and me, we had a rough time getting along.

In my (frustrated) attempt to use leftover yarn, I knitted this sweater and ripped it out and knitted it again and ripped some more - I can’t promise the pattern instructions will make sense.  I nearly gave up after the twentieth try; well, really, it was probably only the third.  But I was in a hurry because the sweater was started during the drive to Yellowstone and he needed it for Yellowstone.  I had three days!

The dilemma was trying to creatively use up all of the three colors (all of which were of different yardage quantities), yet hoping to have enough to make the sweater.  At one point, there didn’t seem enough yarn for the sleeves and I feared having to rip a bit of the body to add to the sleeves, but it turned out there was enough… Whew!  In the end, only about two yards of just the dark grey was left.  This is yet another argument for why knitting from someone else’s design can make life so much easier.

But look how cute the sweater finally turned out:

As we were preparing for our trip, I had in mind a specific sweater I wanted to knit for the little boy: a saddle-shouldered fishermen’s sweater.  Because the weather would be a bit cooler (actually, much cooler), this sweater would need to keep him warm yet dashing.  I envisioned a sweater he could wear to dinner.

Not wanting the sweater to look too large, I knitted it in the size that would fit him just as he was: nine months old.  Even if he wore it for just a few days, it was okay.

The body pattern is a revised version of Stephen Hawker’s slate pattern found in Cables, Diamonds, Herringbone; Secrets of Knitting Traditional Fishermen’s Sweaters by Sabine Domnick.  Saddle shoulder instructions were borrowed from EZ’s Knitting Workshop.