Materials: 2 skeins of Cascade Eco+ (100% Peruvian Wool) from the Webs annual sale in Navy. Size 7 circular needles. 40 cheapo buttons from the local Fabricville. Pattern: Owls.

Time: Less than a month or so.

Cost: Yarn: $24. Buttons: $4. Total: $30!

I love the attention to detail in this pattern. What makes it extraordinary, I think, is the careful shaping–the waist shaping has been moved to the back, for example, and there are short rows to make the back of the neck higher than the front (I’ve never seen this before, and it makes a much better-fitting sweater).

As usual, I made some modifications: I moved each join for the arm back two stitches, kept the armpit stitches live and grafted them together, sized up the arms one size (and did an extra decrease row at the yoke to get rid of the extra), and had to do some ripping and re-knitting because I originally neglected to do the ribbing on one size smaller needles, as the pattern suggests.

I also altered the shaping to get gauge: my row gauge in the Eco+ was just about 6 stitches / inch, so I worked an extra stockinette row between each of the increase / decrease rows to space them out appropriately. My stitch gauge was about 4 stitches / inch, so I added an extra decrease row (right before working the 1″ of stockinette at the smallest part of the waist) and increase row.

After following these mods, I only have a couple of regrets. One is that I didn’t add in extra vertical length to the yoke, given the difference between my row gauge and the pattern’s; I didn’t think about it, for whatever reason. As a result, the finished sweater rides lower around my neck than it otherwise would, but it’s not uncomfortaable. Similarly, given that I reworked the shaping, it turns out that I didn’t need to move the sleeves forward after all; they have a tendency to bind under the front of my armpits, in fact. I should’ve left them alone, but the sweater isn’t too uncomfortable to wear by any stretch of the imagination.

The overall result is a sweater that is cute, but not too cute.

Not to mention warm, fast to knit, and under $30.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 9:51 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.