I’ve got yet another knitting project in the works! This one is the “Janetta Dexter Sampler Sweater” from the back of Jacqueline Fee’s The Sweater Workshop. The wool is a really soft chunky cotton/acrylic that my Mom sent me for my birthday. It’s knitting up really fast and I’m enjoying the fairisle practice. So far I’ve done the zig-zag pattern and now I’m working on the houndstooth. It’s gonna be big, bulky, and fun…
Sorry for the silence… but I’ve been busy finishing my Weasley Sweater! It’s a seamless raglan in deep maroon with a great big gray “K” embroidered on the front. It’s 100% wool and warm as hell. It’s probably actually a little nicer than the ones Mrs. Weasley makes, but faced with a choice between filmic accuracy and my desire to not wear a lumpy boat-necked monstrosity, my sense of fashion won out. (Apologies for the lack of contrast in the picture; Snookums took it at midnight as soon as I finished the thing. I’ll post some better ones – and pattern notes for you knitters – tomorrow.) My costume for the Azkaban opening is taking shape… I just need to make myself a Gryffindor scarf and locate a grey pleated skirt. The Snook said I can use his black academic gown. Yay!
Update: Better photo and knitting notes added.
First off, if you want to knit a sweater as painlessly as possible get Jacqueline Fee’s book The Sweater Workshop. It won’t teach you the basics of knitting, but if you already know how to knit and purl it’ll show you everything else you need to know to design your own sweaters. This is my third project based on the book (after the sampler and the Snook’s sweater) and it turned out great.
The wool is Naturally Guernsey DK from New Zealand in the Mackenzie (purple) and Dundee (gray) colors. I started by measuring one of my existing sweaters from armpit-to-armpit to get my key number. Everything else in the pattern is based on percentages of that. I wanted it to be a little big and baggy too (to match the ones in the movie). Then I knitted a swatch with a couple different size needles to find a gauge I liked. Once I had that, I started the body on a big 80cm long 4.5mm circular needle. I did about two inches of ribbing and then knitted the body up the armpits in straight stocking stitch. Then I set it aside and started the sleeves.
I decided to be clever and knit both sleeves at once on two circular needles. It was actually almost a little too clever for me but I got it in the end. I went with the “full” style sleeves from the book, which means that you do all the increases as soon as you finish the cuff and the rest of the sleeve is knit straight. It’s a baggier style which I like. Once I had knitted them to the armpit, I carefully joined all three tubes together. (It’s actually not that complicated and Fee gives you great instructions.)
Once everything is on one needle, away to the collar you go. I decided that since my jumper was going to be plain, I would liven it up with a decorative raglan seamline. (Raglan sleeves are like a sweatshirt, where you have a diagonal seam running from the armpit up the collar.) I used seamline “E” in the book, which consisted of PSSO, K1, and PSSO-R. Not complicated and I got into the rhythm pretty quickly. Eventually I had to stop going around and round and start going back and forth to prepare for the collar. I went with the standard crew neck setup but planned to do it as a rollneck instead. (For a rollneck you just knit every round instead of ribbing them.) Once I got the rollneck on, though, I didn’t really like the way it looked. So I frogged it back and did a conventional ribbed crewneck instead. Looks much better.
Next I had to graft the underarm openings, which again sounds difficult but isn’t too hard if you follow Fee’s instructions. Lastly, I had the Snook help me print out a large pixellated letter “K” to use as a pattern for the front. The letter had to be done as swiss darning (or “duplicate stitch”) because there’s no way to do intarsia when you’re circular knitting (unless you want to weave in a million loose ends). It ended up being somewhat like doing cross-stitch. Once that was done, I just had to weave in my ends and it was finished!
Curse be damned; I knitted the Snook a sweater. This is my first seamless and patternless sweater and the first of my own design. The stripe pattern is from a woven scarf his mother gave him a few years back. (I just graphed it and worked it twice, once in reverse.) The sweater itself is green and the pattern’s in grey. It’s made of a thick Aran wool and it really absorbs the light, which makes it pretty hard to see here. It’s got a regular crew neck and raglan sleeves, which means the seamlines run up diagonally from the armpit to the neck (like a sweatshirt). My biggest problem was getting the cast-off collar loose enough to fit over his head! Here some more pictures of him in his favorite modeling poses:
The first is called “The Beach is That Way!”…
…and the second is “What Time is It?”. I make him do them whenever he tries something on, because it cracks my shit up.
My First Sweater
It’s done! It’s slightly wonky and the fit is weird in places, but it’s wearable. (I think I’ll be able to block out some of the weirdness when I wash it. I should’ve done that first, but I was too excited to wear it.) The pattern is called “Sweet” and it’s from The Knitter’s Bible by Kate Buller. The wool is Jo Sharp DK 100% wool in “Plum”. The ruffle looks hard but – other than having to cast on 500 stitches – it was suprisingly easy to knit. The actual hardest part was sewing everything together at the end. I suck at that. The seams are a little bulky and non-symmetrical, which accounts for most of the fitting problems. I’m definitely going to knit my next sweater in the round so I don’t have to worry about that stuff. But it’s kinda cute, right?
(Edited to add: Yeah, ignore my glazed expression in the photo. It was 7:30 am and I’d overslept, so I’m a bit out of it.)
