Design Journey: Making Decisions

My journey towards the "fantastic weekend sweater" has begun. I've been playing around with ideas in my head and I've been knitting them up to see how they look.

Remember I started with a DK weight woollen spun Romney wool? I bought it from Rosewood Wool and it's locally grown and spun wool, naturally dyed with Henna. The yarn is super inspiring. It's rustic and hairy and coarser to the touch than yarn I've been using lately. It feels like good old-fashioned wool and I'm I'm really enjoying working with it.

My idea started with a vision of a comfortable sweater. At first, while I could imagine the places I'd wear it, what I might wear it with and how I'd yank my sleeves down and curl up in it, the details of my sweater were still a little vague. I just knew it needed to be comfy so I decided to dissect exactly what that meant to me. It turned out that in this case "comfy" meant; something sloppy, with good drape but not too heavy. And, including some texture but not too much, probably just as a detail. A picture started to form in my mind and I thought a bit about how I'd knit it. I liked the idea of knitting it in one piece and preferably from the top down so I could try it on as I went. It turned out my idea of comfy included comfortable, pleasant knitting as well as how the sweater felt to wear.

Over the next few days my ideas slowly evolved. Little snippets came to me as I was doing something totally unrelated like driving the car or taking a shower. I realised I this sweater needed a soft stockinette body and I was inspired to try knitting a swatch with a larger than usual needle size to create a more fluid fabric. Then, another day, I was struck with the idea that I fancied a sweater that curved gently over my shoulders and I decided it'd have a rounded yoke rather than raglan or set in sleeves.

I remembered a stitch pattern that had caught my eye a while ago in one of my stitch dictionaries, so I fished it out. Lace chevron inset into twisted ribbing. Interesting. I wondered if I could use that somehow? I abandoned my first swatch once I decided that it looked too loose. Smaller needles knitted up much better and I loved the chevron in the ribbing but when I draped it on my wrist it was clear that the detail was lost. I wondered if the chevrons needed to be smaller?

So, that's where I'm at. I'm still swatching and trying out ideas. My next job is to rewrite the lace chevron pattern to make it smaller and knit another swatch to see how it goes. I'll report back soon!