Ruthless Knitting

Pattern: February Lady Sweater (an adaptation by Pamela Wynne of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s February Baby Sweater)

Size: 37″ bust, 16″ length and 13″ sleeves to armhole, about 9″ raglan seam

Yarn: Brown Sheep Nature Spun Worsted (100 percent wool; 245 yds per 100 g skein), color 133 (blue fog)

Yardage: About 800 yards (3.25 skeins)

Source: Yarnzilla

Needles: US 8 (5.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: 16.5 stitches and 32 rows = 4″ in garter stitch, blocked; lace repeats are about 1.75″ wide and .75″ tall

Notes: This sweater took me six weeks to complete. Given that I spent much of my free time in those six weeks lying on the couch reading detective novels and vampire books, I think I can safely say that in normal circumstances it would have been a quick knit.

I ended up modifying the pattern a bit to suit the yarn I chose, which knit to a slightly larger gauge for me than the 18 stitches over 4″ called for in the pattern. I cast on 83 stitches for the 35″ size and then just kept going with the garter stitch raglan increases until I had 168 stitches at the armholes, omitting the eyelet row altogether. The sweater looked awfully small while I was knitting it, but it blocked to more or less the size I wanted (whew).

I used some vintage mother-of-pearl buttons on the yoke, and I’m quite pleased with them. I may need to reinforce the buttonholes, which gap a bit, particularly at the bottom. But that’s easily done if it turns out to be necessary.

I enjoyed working with Nature Spun Worsted, which is a dirt-cheap workhorse yarn that comes in a huge number of colors. I think I spent about $15.00 on this sweater. Can’t beat that! The only drawback was that the yarn was rather smelly before I washed it. I suspect that’s not the fault of the online seller but rather a consequence of the fact that Brown Sheep mothproofs this yarn. I would rather not have my yarn dipped in mothproofing chemicals before I knit with it, but at least the smell went away with one washing.

I picked this pattern because I thought it would make an attractive maternity sweater that I will still be able to wear after the baby is born. And indeed, it is a nice maternity style, but it turns out that after 37 weeks of pregnancy I am somewhat weary of wearing things that button only over the chest and then drape fetchingly over the gigantic baby bump. Not that there are a lot of other style options to choose from — one may as well highlight the bump, since concealing it is a lost cause.

Still, as much as I enjoy the baby’s exploratory nudging from the inside, I look forward with pleasure to having a non-globular stomach again, even if it’s a bit worse for the wear. Last week I thought of a favorite pair of pre-pregnancy pants and was swept with a wave of nostalgia. Likewise, it is with pleasant anticipation that I look forward to wearing this sweater in the more standard, non-pregnant fashion. Meanwhile, it’s doing a nice job of pinch-hitting as maternity wear.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:50 am and is filed under Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.