better late than never

While I’m playing catchup and posting a bit more frequently, I thought it might be a good time to mention another sweater that I finished quite a while ago and forgot about blogging. I started my Idlewood last year – Ravelry tells me last November – and knit it up in shockingly short order. I posted a few progress photos, as some of you may recall. But it was winter, and the light wasn’t great, so I kept telling myself I’d take pictures of the finished sweater later.

“Later” apparently meant sometime in April – I took these pictures last week, before leaving for work.

I love this sweater an unreasonable amount. It is one of the few handknits I’ve worn to work multiple times, and one of the few pullovers I’ve been able to wear indoors without overheating. It’s warm and cozy, but incredibly practical, and works very well with my body type. After seeing how often I wear this one, I sort of want to make a few more in different colours – I’d love a grey version, and maybe a navy or dark purple one.

Plus, knitting it with Quince & Co Osprey made it a pretty inexpensive sweater – this only took 5 skeins in my size – and the yarn is holding up really nicely with wearing. This picture was taken after I’d worn it to work, multiple times, and washed it once. It doesn’t quite look new, but I haven’t had any problems with pilling or parts looking “worn” yet.

In conclusion: this was a pretty good sweater decision, and I’m glad I made it.

zippertimes: an almost-tutorial

Installing a zipper in one of my handknits was something sort of new to me – like steeking, I found the idea of it weirdly intimidating for what, in hindsight, was a shockingly long time. But really, I love wearing store-bought sweaters with zippers in them, and it was starting to seem silly that I couldn’t make my own. So here is – not a tutorial necessarily, but a step-by-step journey through my zipper process. With pictures.

I started by wet-blocking my sweater, laying it flat, and waiting until it was (mostly) dry. Then I measured the front of my sweater, at the place where I wanted my zipper to go, to see how long it would need to be. The length of my fronts was 20.5 inches, give or take, so I bought a 20 inch zipper in a reasonably matching colour. I seem to have lucked out in this respect; zippers at my local fabric store came in 18″, 20″, and 22.”

I laid everything out, and placed my zipper so that it was close to where I wanted it.

Next, I pinned each side of the zipper to each front. I found that doing both sides at the same time, from the top down, made this a lot easier – it meant I could open the zipper as I moved down.

(The goal was for each pin to go through the sweater front and the zipper, but not the back of the sweater.)

To keep the zipper about where I wanted it, I used a needle and thread to baste the zipper into place. “Baste,” as it’s used here, means “do a very sloppy, kind of crappy bit of sewing that will keep everything together for a little while.” It’s a little more reliable than leaving pins in, but it’s meant to be taken out later.

Then, I got out my handsewing supplies to do a proper job. I used embroidery needles and quilting thread, because it was what I had on hand.

I unzipped my zipper, and separated each half. This is where I was glad I had basted, instead of relying on my pins – it kept each half of the zipper about where I wanted it, and I didn’t have to worry about sharps.

Starting at one end of one front, I made a knot in my thread, and secured it to start sewing.

I sewed from the zipper side to the knit side, trying to pull the needle into the space between strands of yarn, either in the middle of stitches or between stitches.

As long as I kept my thread between strands, rather than crossing over yarn, it ended up invisible on the knit side once I’d pulled the thread tight.

I continued down the entire length of the front. I did try to space my stitches so that they were a reasonably consistent distance from the zipper teeth, and passed through the same column of knit stitches on the knit side. That said, it’s pretty obvious which side I did first; I was much better at making this happen once I’d had a little bit of practice. I don’t think there’s any functional difference between the “good” side and the “bad side,” though.

Once I got to the end of one front, I continued to sew back towards my starting point, filling in the gaps between stitches. When I was done, it looked like this.

I repeated the process for the other side, and tried on my brand new sweater-with-a-zipper!

finished: coraline

I was planning to talk about this project a lot sooner, but it kind of got away from me, and now it’s done.

This is the sweater I started during my trip to Vancouver – I bought the yarn at Baaad Anna’s, and cast on that night. It moved really quickly. Like, really quickly, despite the fact that it’s knit on 3.25mm needles, which makes it the finest-gauge sweater I’ve ever knit. I think a lot of it had to do with the simple, straightforward pattern – there’s something about a hundred zillion million miles of stockinette that delights and amuses me, and I really took to this project.

This is Coraline (Rav), from Ysolda Teague, which is one of Those Patterns that everyone and their sister has already knit. To be honest, I passed it over more than once, because I originally thought that the swingy look in the pattern photos was from actually decreasing the fronts, rather than letting the stockinette curl naturally. I thought the way the sweater was worn in the photos would be unflattering on my body, and didn’t really want to go through the mental effort of doing math to modify it into something that suited me better.

But on my vacation, I was browsing Ravelry, looking for a lighter-weight sweater to knit going into spring, and I took a closer look at the pattern description. This sweater is knit straight from the bottom up! The fronts touch on their own! Knit with no ease, it is, in fact, exactly the sweater I was looking for, and the fit is fantastic. The pattern didn’t need to be changed one bit.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I modified two minor things: I knit the bottoms of the sleeves to match the body, because I have a secret passion for turned-over hems, and I added a zipper. Really, that’s all I needed to do.

The yarn is Mirasol Nuna, which is a merino/bamboo/silk blend, and it’s wonderfully drapey and warm.