Colour-Block Sweater

Believe it or not, I've got knitting to blog about. Quite a lot of it, actually; this is just the first sweater. I'll be blogging other finished projects in the next few days.



I actually finished this sweater last fall, and have worn the hell out of it (I'm sure you can see pilling in the photos). I'm not sure why it took me so long to photograph it. It's knit from Jo Sharp Classic DK Wool, one of my very favourite yarns; this is the third sweater I've knit from it so far.



I could not have made this sweater with a straight face; it was a stash-busting project, something to knit for fun and wear around the house. It languished for a long time, at one point I put it aside with only one sleeve to go. I wasn’t sure if I would ever finish it. I thought it was laughably (if pleasingly) ugly.



Then I showed it to my friend Tara, who looked at it with a straight face and thought it was gorgeous. After getting her fresh perspective on it I picked it up again and finished it, and now I love it and wear it frequently.



I planned the shape of the sweater, but made up the colour pattern as I went along. The finishing was incredibly intense. After a false start or two, I came up with a labour-intensive seaming technique to give me the coloured seams I wanted. I tried several different collar solutions before deciding on the I-Cord-trimmed version I used. For weaving in ends, I split each strand into two plies and wove them in in separate directions using a sharp needle. There’s one point in the sweater where I had tried knitting the ends in as I went, but it wasn’t a very satisfactory result; it seems I’ve become very uptight about finishing details!



Considering that I usually knit sweaters in the round using one colour of yarn, this was quite a departure. It was a lot of fun though, and I want to do it again. I'm thinking of writing a pattern to sell that's made in a similar way: worked in pieces with an intarsia pattern and coloured seams. It won't be random blocks like this because holy crap, what a nightmare that would be to chart and size. I'm still rolling ideas for it around in my head.