Ok, I promised that I would blow through some of my sweater pictures on my computer, because they're not doing anything for anyone where they are now. This time, I'm going to show my variant on Alice Starmore's "Norway Sweater." With this and the last one I seem to be in something of a nordic kick. I'm not sure what that's about.
This is from the Fisherman's Sweater Book. This is one of the few Starmore books that are still in print. It has two stranded sweaters, but most of the book is texture of some kind. Not my favorite But I made both of the color work sweaters, almost immediately. This is the second sweater that I made, despite it being the easier of the two.
Go figure.
Stats: The black is Cascade 220 and the blue is Aracunia nature wool. Both claim to be worsted weight, but the later is more in the DK/sport range. I learned that after the fact. Knitted with size five.
Alterations: I didn't do much other than make the colors a bit more sedate than the original. I also simplified the sweater to make it less obnoxiously feminine. (The design calls for flower motifs to be tiediously embroidered on, and for a band of red flowers around the waist.) So I changed the ribbing, shortened the collar (This is the sweater where I got the 1.5 inch collar hight guideline. I love the collar on this: best crew neck I've done probably.)
The one down side to this sweater is that it's amazingly long. Amazingly long. It goes half way to my knees. Seriously. So most coats don't cover it all the way, so it's hard to find times to wear it, frankly, and the pattern is hard to see, but I don't mind that so much. And particularly with fashion looking a bit more like the 80s than I think anyone is comfortable with--deep down--it's not so bad. Really though, if you were shorter than I, it would be a dress.
Enough blabbing. Here are pictures. First from the front:
And now from the Back:
Oh and you can see one of the other "features" of the nature wool in these pictures: Dye-lots are completely irrelevant every skein is different and noticeably so. Luckily it worked out alright this time, though I made one sweater with it once were I really had to play with it to get it to not look really bad
Also, sorry about the somewhat lackluster picture quality. I'd like to tell you that someone at the tychoish.com team was working on it, but alas, I think we're lucky that there are any pictures whatsoever. It's a shame you can't get freelance photographers on Amazon Turk or something.
Sigh.
My current knitting is continuing pretty well. Nothing major to report. I'm almost to the beginning of the back of the neck steek on this sweater, and I'm thinking that I'll probably work on socks and other such things rather than push to get it done--and this is admittedly a stupid reason--given that I left my cone of favorite waste yarn at home. Also, my needle has grown too short, and I don't have a good solution to this issue yet.
Onward and Upward!