Materials: 12 balls Elann Peruvian Highland Donegal (90% Highland Wool/ 10% Donegal) in Slate; size 6 needles.  Avast pattern.

Time: 1 month.

Cost: $50 CAD.

Pete has watched me knit for the past, oh, 6 years, and he’s developed an excellent secondhand appreciation of the craft and the materials. So, when I suggested making a sweater for around-the-house wear — something that would be warmer than the sweatshirts he’s been locked into for the past two months, anyway — he agreed, and we came up with a list of specific demands that would guarantee he’d actually wear it:

• Warmth. Aesthetics weren’t as important as fit and functionality. Wool or alpaca were definitely in order here, and something inexpensive so he could feel free to wear the finished garment down to the ground.
• Fit. Pete’s got a very slim build, but a horror of tight-fitting clothes (it took a few years for me to convince him that XXL t-shirts really weren’t necessary.) So, it needed to be loose enough to allow freedom of movement, but not baggy enough to seem grandfatherly.
• It needed a zipper or buttons, because, if he’s to actually wear it around the house, pull-overs are too much of a hassle. (I actually understand this, because I often can’t be bothered to pull a sweatshirt on over my head and instead head for a zippered hoodie.) Buttons were a bit too Mr. Rogers-y for his tastes, so a zipper it would be.
• The Avast! pattern was also simple enough for his tastes – he’s not into patterns or texture. And since we were aiming for a truly functional garment, not something that would live out its years at the bottom of a drawer, that’s what we went with.

To fit these requirements, I removed the cable from the bottom of the pattern and instead worked 2×2 ribbing for a few inches. We also decided to use ribbing for the bottom of the sleeve cuffs instead of a turned hem; it matches the bottom of the sweater, and has the added advantage of making the sleeves easy to push up or fold over if necessary. (Like I said, functionality is key.) Since the Donegal Tweed is a single-ply yarn, I added some twisted rib elbow patches just for kicks (and worked both sleeves at the same time, so I wouldn’t need to keep copious notes on what I was improvising.)

It was also a pretty… how shall we say… unexciting knit, so I spent most of my time reading while I worked on it.  As a result, I made it through the French translation of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in record time.

Unexpectedly, the finished product not only meets Pete’s demands for functionality, but he also really likes it – as in, stood in front of the mirror after it was finished admiring himself, and then strutted around the house doing his best Bruce-Campbell-as-Duke-Nukem impression: “Damn, I’m looking good!” So, it’s totally a hit.

And as soon as I entered the room with my camera, Sebastian awoke from his ungainly sprawled-out nap position and stared fixedly at the lens until I took some photos of him.  So, here you go, Buddy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 1:14 pm and is filed under diy, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.