I’m still catching up with Christmas knitting reports but now for the finale – My Knight’s sweater.
The plan here was to knit a sweater that would look like chain mail for my Knight enthusiast nephew. It seemed like a pretty straightforward plan until I got started with it. It started with choice of pattern – I struggled to find a garter stitch hooded sweater so I plumped for Atherton by Nancy Elizabeth Munro. Meanwhile I’d ordered my Cascade 220 in a charcoal grey and marled grey. The pattern is top down and starts with a garter hoodie which I thought would get me off to a good start before I started doing the modifications to turn this into chainmail. See how I conveniently blanked out how much knitting there is a hood? But then as I progressed to the body I thought ‘hang on, if I do this in reverse stocking stitch rather than garter stitch I don’t have to do any purling in the round, I’ll get it done quicker and I can make it reversible’. Stocking stitch with a garter stitch hood, cuffs, hem and at the raglan increases one one side, garter stitch and reverse stocking stitch on the other. And what a good idea it would be to continue the the charcoal from the hood down neck opening plackets.
So I certainly had a plan and by and large it went to plan if however. A little slower than I’d anticipated mainly because the contrast at the placket just didn’t look right with the intarsia joins on both sides. So it got ripped back a couple of times and I don’t know if it was panic at the time I had to finish this or whether there was just so much happening that I had a brain fail but I couldn’t get it to look how I wanted. So a new plan was born – I decided that I’d pick up along the placket join between the two colours and work an applied I-cord down one side, across the bottom and again up the the other side. I wish I’d thought about this sooner, before the repeated ripping back because it looked really good and neatened up the plackets on both sides.
Now, unfortunately this wasn’t all done by the time of present giving so my nephew received his sweater all wrapped up minus sleeves and it was finished the night before we left. The pictures that followed from my sister-in-law however suggest that my nephew thought it worked out pretty well in the end too.
I love the homemade shield and the helmet which is made out of a Pandoro box.
So that was my mad December spilling into January. 8 knitted gifts in all, 7 made in 6 weeks and I’ve been enjoying the Knitmore Girls Podcast again – I had to avoid it during December as they hold fervently to the view that you should not be doing holiday knitting in December, which is not what you need to hear when you have all your holiday knitting planned for December!
So you can probably guess my New Year’s Resolution – No more last minute gift knitting. I’ve even started work on a couple of gifts for next year but I’ll share those another day.
