A couple of months ago I bought this book in an op-shop for 20cents and fell in love with so many patterns. The patterns range from the 1920s to the 1980s, and yes, there is a knitted swimsuit in there! BTW does anyone recognise the model on the front cover?
yep, it’s Andie MacDowell, apparently she modelled for Vogue before taking up acting.
Anyway, I bought some wool from The Fibre of the Gods who not only grow their own alpaca wool, but also have a processing mill. My wool came from Molly and I love the fact that she features on the band. This fact becomes important later in my post.
I initially bought the wool for my One Year One Outfit mission, but then had the brown crisis so decided to knit a jumper for Mark and found this 1957 pattern in the above-mentioned book.
I do love Aran jumpers. The cabling and raised stitches make the fabric much thicker and therefore warmer. So, this jumper is light but very warm. I also love knitting cables as they give me something to think about when I’m a passenger in the car or watching television. Whilst I don’t mind mindless knitting, my threshold for boredom is pretty low, and that’s why I have a knitting machine (or four) in my stable (see knitted trousers).
I was busy knitting away and realised that I was going to be about 30g short of wool. I emailed Hazel from the Fibre of the Gods for more Molly and she informed me that she didn’t have any more. Mild panic ensued and she scoured the known universe and tracked down a ball sold to another customer, so the crisis was averted and I was able to finish the jumper.
I am pretty good at doing tension gauges when I knit, but for some reason I doubted the one I did for this jumper and went for slightly bigger needles with the result that I think Mark’s jumper is too big for him.
He of course denied it, but I could tell that it wasn’t comfortable by the way he adjusted the neckline. So, I have managed to convince him to give it to me for “tweaking”, which means that I am pulling it apart and reworking the entire thing, making it smaller and reducing the width of the neckline. This means that the extra ball of wool I had Hazel track down was completely unnecessary.
I am not done with this jumper yet!