Despite having been a little quiet here on the blog since the beginning of the year, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been knitting to talk about. There has. Lots of knitting but unfortunately lots of re-knitting and tales of woe too. In the case of today’s Mortmain sweater it’s been quite a salutary lesson in ‘You should have known better’, or more precisely ‘You should have known yourself better’. Sometimes it seems we get a little too comfy with our craft and need to be taken down a peg or two…

So what project has been so instructive? The Mortmain Sweater From Susan Crawford’s new book Echoes. If you remember, I talked about going to the book launch in December and started the year ready to knit, and knit from it.

When I first saw Mortmain, it immediately called to me. Short sleeved yoked sweaters are totally my thing and while I’ve never tried the bottom up raglan come yoke construction I thought I’d go for it.

Right here I must add a disclaimer; there is absolutely nothing wrong with the pattern. All the issues that follow are really a result of my own inability to think things through and instead my tendency to jump in with both feet and an abundance of enthusiasm.

The snugger vintage fit and higher modest necklines however, don’t really work for me so initially I knit the pattern as written but made a larger size for the added ease I prefer.

Unfortunately, by the time I finished the bottom up knitting I realised it was too big. In sizing up for more ease in the circumference, the yoke was too deep and this in turn made the neckline really high. To be honest I had seen this issue coming. As it became evident that the yoke would be much deeper than my other yoked sweaters, I of course knitted on thinking a few less rows later in the yoke would solve the problem. It didn’t.

I should probably give a little context here. I generally rule out an awful lot of sweaters and, sometimes, whole designers who design high or unshaped necklines. I really struggle with anything too high in the neck and don’t like anything that touches my manubrium.

A quick anatomy diversion here may clarify. The manubrium is that slightly depressed bone at the top of the sternum, the central chest bone, where the two clavicles comes across from the shoulders and meet. The two raised points of the clavicles end at the base of throat with the manubrium in the centre. I find anything that cuts across this point, like many, many sweaters these days, really uncomfortable and I find myself constantly pulling at the neckline. As such, I either rule out such designs or modify if they lend themselves to this. It’s also why I generally to prefer top down garments as they tend to be easier to modify, and have the added benefit of being able to check if your modifications have worked at the start of the project rather than the end.

Anyway, my first reworking was to pull back the neck ribbing. The plan was to take out rows in the yoke above the colourwork and work short rows on the back to tilt the neckline forward more. The pattern as written does have short rows below the yoke to create this shaping, it just wasn’t enough in the size I had made to fit my personal preference.

Unfortunately this didn’t fix the problem and, after a time out in which I started another project (!), I took a slightly more radical approach. I decided to detach the yoke from the body of the sweater. I would keep the body as this did have the amount of ease that I wanted, and I would simply re-knit the yoke. This way I could knit the yoke in my preferred top down manner and graft the two sections together.

So I started the yoke at the top and needing a shallower yoke I sized down on the yoke making a size 4 yoke to go with my size 5 body. I thought it would also be quite straightforward to increase the numbers below the yoke to match what I needed to graft it to the existing size 5 body. I also thought ahead at this stage and based on my row gauge and my preferred yoke depths decided to take out the top row of small colourwork peeries to maintain a shallower yoke.

However, something wasn’t quite right. This time I found the extra short rows I’d worked in the neck had created a slight ‘hump’. So next, I figured that if I pulled back the neckline to beyond the first set of increases and worked the short rows on this larger number of stitches and then went directly into to the rib, first using a 3.75mm needle and the transitioning to a 3.25mm needle, this would remove the ‘hump’ and make a more gentle gathering in of the fabric.

While this worked for the neckline this there was still something slightly off with the fit. Instead of dealing with this I tried a whole different strategy. At this point I decided that it seemed that I had enough yarn to actually add sleeves to the sweater, one of the pattern options. At the beginning I wasn’t sure if this would be the case, I was incredibly close the yarn requirements with the brown yarn I used for the body, assuming the cone was actually full. This had been a charity shop buy and had been in my stash so long there was no guarantee that this was the case, but having actually knitted the sweater I was quite confident I could stretch to sleeves. I also thought that I should probably do this now as they too may have an effect on how it would fit.

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Yes, there seems to have been a bit of wishful thinking involved here, thinking that adding sleeves to the sweater would solve all the fit problems. Can you see what I’ve done here? The smaller circumference of the yoke meant it all sat higher on my shoulders so despite the modifications, the neck still sat too high. The addition of sleeves (as yet unfinished) did not magically fix this, and the transition to the larger body didn’t work as well as I thought it might, you can see all that ease bunching up under the yoke.

At this stage I was really doubting my own wisdom, lack thereof, and whether I could rescue this project at all. Maybe there is a good reason I never knit this style of sweater after all. Just look at that yoke though. While it may not fit, I was totally in love with the combo of background yarns and those lovely Single Flock South Down sheep yarns, naturally dyed by Louise at South Down Yarns and bought at the last Edinburgh Yarn Festival. They’ve sat in my stash since then waiting for the perfect project, and I really believed this was it, if only I could crack the fit issues…

So, I threaded a needle around the body stitches and detached the body from the yoke and I frogged the yoke, again.

The third yoke I decided should be a size 5 yoke, as had been the first, but this time I left off the small top and bottom peeries and just worked the main colourwork band thus maintaining the circumference while reducing the depth. With the body stitches on the needle I knitted it from the bottom up. I worked the short rows in the body before starting the colorwork, as per the pattern. I didn’t work the final decrease at the neckline, but instead added some additional short rows over this larger number of stitches so they were a little more spaced out and then worked the rib as I had done on the previous iteration.

It worked – the neckline and the sweater finally fit. I was so excited at having cracked it…

…Except…

… I wasn’t totally convinced by the length of the body, it was in that region of no man’s land where it’s not cropped but it’s not longer line either so drew the eye to my widest part. Also I was a bit short of yarn for finishing the sleeves.

So I had yet another decision to make do I put up with the length and go with elbow length sleeves and allow this project to be done, or do I do something else about it.

What do you think?

Of course, I was so far into this now, I decided to do something about it. I picked up the stitches about 3 inches above the bottom hem, and frogged everything below that point. I then lengthened the the sleeves and then returned to the body.

Being a little cropped is ok with me but I am a bit wary of the back of cropped garments riding up too much so I tend to put short row shaping in the back of cropped garments, which was my initial thought here. But then I had the idea that maybe I could make the most of the yarn I had by working a a split hem instead creating a lower back than the front. I really like how that worked out.

I was done. I sewed in my ends, blocked my sweater and started wearing it.

The only thing was that I had a nagging feeling that perhaps my arms are actually different lengths? One sleeve seemed a little longer than the other when I was wearing it, but I couldn’t see any difference when I compared the sleeves when I wasn’t wearing it. This felt noticeable with the bracelet length and rather than pushing up my sleeves which is my usual way, I found myself pulling one of them down to match the other. Initially I thought it wouldn’t be a problem… except the more I wore it the more I realised it was.

So inspired by the Dalloway sweater that I was also working on when I needed time out from this project, I decided to add a colourwork band at the cuffs. That way I could use a little more of my beautiful naturally dyed yarns and get the sleeves the perfect length. This is what I did, first knitting the colourwork using just 2 colours, then swiss darning the third colour.

This journey may have been a bit tortuous and my version is not particularly faithful to the original, but I think it was worth all the reworking.

I love wearing this sweater, it’s perfect with jeans or a pinafore. While it took me a few (actually many) months to blog about this process and to take the final pictures, that didn’t stopped me wearing and enjoying the sweater in the cooler months.

So what have I learnt, or re-learnt, in all this?

• Well, while it’s ok to knit late into the night, that’s perhaps not the best time to make decisions about your knitting.
• When thinking about modifications, one not only needs to think about the first change but also the knock on effects.
• As easy as it is be seduced by a pattern and how it works with any given yarn choice, sometimes you need to be realistic with yourself in terms of the amount of work it may take to make it work, or whether it’s just not the garment for you!
• In for a penny, in for a pound. Sometimes being stubborn pays off!

I’m please I stuck with this pattern, although really, I ended up with quite different garment in the end. The colourwork colour combo and the fact that I really liked the main yarn when I was working with it, certainly helped in this respect. The actual knitting was never a chore and I’ll happily knit colourwork any day of the week, so that was in my favour. Had the garment used a less favoured technique it could have been so different.

Now as I finish this post it’s so hot I’ve turned to knitting with cotton and even that feels a little oppressive at times.

Do you have projects that were a bit of a trial but were so worth the perseverance? If you do, I’d love to hear about it, but I’d much prefer it if your crafting is always plain sailing!

Until next time, take care and happy knitting and happy making,

Tess xxx