Finished Object Friday!

So, how does one go about starting a crafting blog?  Do Not Want to go back to the beginning.  I figure I can highlight a few of my favorite projects from the last few months, and in the future maybe highlight older ones?  We'll see how this goes.  For today, Let's talk about Ixchel!

I got the yarn last Christmas, it's Magpie Yarns, in the colors from the original sweater pattern.  I don't *always* do that, but I'd been eyeing this pattern for literally years and couldn't imagine it in anything different.  Bonus, the yarn is a cashmere, merino, nylon blend that is simply scrumptious!

Now, the knitting of the sweater was a little bit trickier then that.  It involved a *lot* of difficult techniques, and is certainly not for the faint of heart. 

Throughout the knitting, I constantly joked that the designer didn't actually design for hand knitters, cause.. well, it was rough.

The thing about it is, there's a constant line of a yellow stitch on the front and the back of the body of the sweater.  Just one stitch.  Some rows have more stitches throughout, and some actually seem to resemble a normal stranded sweater.  But those two stitches were the bane of my life for the majority of the knitting.  So, parts of the yoke and body were done with intarsia, where I kept a strand "live" on each side to knit the yellow stitch when there weren't other yellow stitches around, and parts of it employed a nifty double-knitting stranded trick called Jacquard floating.

This was a cool trick that I learned when knitting the Dude Sweater last year.  If you understand double knitting, you probably already understand the basics, but I'll break it down a little bit.

The intention is to keep your floats nice and stretchy across very long stretches of the main color, and to do this, you create and maintain a second fabric behind the main fabric that is essentially not connected at all to the main fabric. You do this by double knitting it. This results in floats that have the stability and stretchiness of knitting without unseemly floats peeking through the main fabric.

 

 In some cases, like the moons before the sleeve break, there's actually a separate "membrane" of yellow fabric inside the sweater. In most of the other cases, it's just a quick stitch here and there, in the same vein as simply catching floats.

I would highly recommend googling this technique if you're endeavoring to knit this pattern.  It's one of those life-changing techniques that gives life to an old hobby, in my opinion anyway.  Something like learning to cable without a cable needle, or mastering brioche.

For the sleeves, which are entirely in the main color with a single vertical motif, I simply swiss darned the moons on. Swiss darning, or duplicate stitching, is an embroidery technique where you follow the line of knit stitches with your contrast color following the chart.

Other adjustments I made were to go up a size in the sleeves at the yoke.

That's about all I have to say about the project.  I started Christmas day and had a completed sweater at the start of June!

 

 

thanks for reading!