Monday, December 17, 2007

Knitting: Mom's Guilt Sweater

Last week, I completed a sweater set for my mother. I have title the set "Mom's Guilt Sweater." The short version of the story behind the title follows. More than a year ago, I volunteered to shorten the sleeves on a ready-to-wear sweater that my mother had purchased. In the process of shortening the sleeves, I ruined the garment. Thus, I knitted the set pictured below to assuage my guilt for having destroyed her sweater.

The photo to the right is the completed sweater set. The jacket is made from the Winchester design in the book Jean Frost Jackets. The instructions call for three colors of sport weight yarn, but the yarn I wanted to use was Knit Picks Gloss (merino and silk) and a now discontinued Memories (merino), both fingering weight yarns. The gold (Serengeti) is the Gloss, and the background yarn is Memories multicolored yarn in Redwood Forest. I chose to use the Gloss for the main color and Memories for both coordinating colors. I really enjoyed working with both yarns. They are soft and easy to knit. Memories gives a consistent gauge regardless of the needles used; however, Gloss shows every loose stitch. Bamboo needles work best with Gloss. On the jacket, the stitch used is a tri-colored linen stitch (closeup in photo below) which is a slip-stitch pattern using only one strand of yarn per row. It is an easy stitch pattern but tedious to work.


Gloss was used for the shell companion sweater. I used 3 X 3 ribbing throughout the garment except for the bottom trim and the neck trim plus a little bit at the top of the front. Seed stitch was used on the neck trim and the top front shoulders. A twisted stitch design from Nikki Epstein's book Knitting on the Edge was used for the trim at the bottom of the sweater.



I used Sweater Wizard software to customize the instructions for the fingering weight yarn. The shell was completely designed in Sweater Wizard. Using Sweater Wizard has given me freedom to design my own sweaters and to modify or customize commercial patterns to suit the yarn I want to use on the garment.