Alpaca Fairisle for Him (2020)
Yarn: Juniper Moon Farm Moonshine
Pattern: Invented by me, using some elements I admired from the Peace Sweater by Dale
Completed: October 4, 2020.
I bought the yarn for this sweater in the Fall of 2018, and started playing with ideas almost immediately. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until two years later that I actually finished (and fixed and finished) the sweater!
I bought the yarn at Mother of Purl in Freeport, ME, when we were stopped there for a lunch break. So, I didn’t have a lot of time to consider the different colours or a specific plan. The downside is — there is very little value differentiation between the brown, green and blue. Only the silver stands out, at all. In the end, it’s not the end of the world — he prefers a “subtle” pattern, anyway 🙂
My initial thoughts ran to doing small mitred squares in the different colours, but that proved too annoying to knit at scale. So, I turned to fairisle. I liked the look of the yoke of the Peace Sweater by Dale, but didn’t want to do exactly that. So, I borrowed the elements I liked (yoke, primarily), and mapped it onto a sweater plan.
It turns out that the alpaca-mix yarn was not so fun to knit in two colours — perhaps because of the lack of “give” in the yarn? So, knitting it took a while, and it was left to languish for long stretches at a time.
When I finally finished it… It was instantly apparent that the neck opening was way too large. Not only would it have been too much exposure/chilly, it was in danger of slipping off his shoulders. I know that feeling in a sweater, and I hate it!
That’s not the sort of thing you can go back and fix by ripping out — it was part of one of the first two pieces knit. I didn’t plan to disassemble the sweater, and rip and re-knit the front piece. Nor did I simply want to add rows to the collar — it would be too bulky in the back, and look silly. In the end, I did manage to sort it out by ripping the collar out, and knitting it again using short rows and tricks learned from turning a heel on socks. The front of the collar is much taller than the back, so it fits properly. And, you might not even notice it’s odd if I didn’t point out the whole story and include pictures of the original neckline 🙂
Finished -- fixed collar!
Whole sweater view (first attempt at collar)
Front
Back
Arm detail
Hot off the needles, first collar
First collar -- the pencil line on the paper is where the finished neckline should reach (per other sweaters)
Detail -- First collar -- the pencil line on the paper is where the finished neckline should reach (per other sweaters)
Second attempt at collar -- meets the target neckline!
Inside view
Hot off the needles -- first collar attempt
Front detail
Mitred square swatch -- too fiddly to make a whole sweater of this!
Value challenges... compare to the black and white of the same picture
Value challenges -- the green, blue and brown are all the same value
Value challenges -- striping in a swatch.
Value challenges -- the stripes disappear, except for the silver
Value challenges -- the patterning is subtle
Value challenges -- the patterning disappears in black and white
Inspector kitty #1 :-)
Inspector kitty #1 :-)
Inspector kitty #2 :-)
Helpurrr....
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