Ruthless Knitting

On a long bike ride with my husband in the summer of 2007, I spent a lot of miles pondering what I wanted to knit and when. I had what felt like too many ideas rolling around in my head and several sweater quantities of yarn under the guest room bed, and I was feeling rather stressed out by both. I started a list in my head of all the sweater design concepts that I was working on and realized that I had plans for six different sweaters in addition to the top I was knitting at the time. I started thinking of these six sweaters as a collection, and I resolved to design and knit all of them over the coming fall and winter. Having a plan made me feel less overwhelmed by all that yarn and all those ideas, and it gave me some structure to work with as I set my knitting priorities for the coming months.

When I first planned the collection, it was on the basis of this set of swatches:

Most of these made it into sweater form, but a few didn’t. I began with the blue and brown silk swatch at about two o’clock. That one became Frances:

Then an entirely unplanned sweater jumped the queue. I visited Vermont on a bike trip and acquired some wonderful mohair/wool blend yarn that I knit up into the Middlebury cardigan.

I suppose that the Middlebury cardigan took the place of the red swatch up there, which was meant to be a fatigue sweater, as described here. I actually went so far as to make a giant swatch of the entire upper chest and neck area for the fatigue sweater, working out exactly how I wanted to do the placket and buttons and writing it all down. Then I got bored with the idea, and then I saw the Cinnabar Pullover in Interweave Knits and lost steam altogether.

I did, however, like the vertical lines of slipped stitches that I had planned to use for that project, and I ended up using them on the sleeves and back of the next sweater I knit: a herringbone pullover called Slim.

Next up, I knit another mohair/wool sweater. This yarn is pictured in the set of swatches above (about 7 o’clock), but I substituted the slipped-stitch pattern I had planned for the traditional patterning of a Fana sweater, and I turned the planned pullover into a henley.

For the fifth sweater in the collection, I used the green silk/wool blends pictured above in a wave and box stitch pattern to make the Tokyo top. This is the only sweater in the collection for which I have written up the pattern; you can find the download link via my Designs page or on Ravelry.

The astute among you may notice that there’s one more swatch up in that first picture that hasn’t made it into sweater form yet. That swatch was inspired by artist William Morris’s designs in January 2007, but I have long since left behind the original sweater I had planned for it. Still, I keep picking away at the design, adding elements, taking others away, rethinking the shape, the colors. The sweater that’s emerging from that process is still at the swatching stage as of February 2008, but when I do eventually manage to create it, I’ll add its picture here, and the collection will be complete!