This summer I was gifted ~850 g of fine, white wool yarn. Since there’s so much of it, and it’s so elegantly fine and white, I had been thinking that it would make a lovely dress. Combined with some other colour so it doesn’t become a wedding dress – maybe knit sideways, with contrasting vertical stripes.

Then I made a gauge swatch, and the yarn turned out to be really stiff. Like, my gauge swatches stand up on their own, from just the natural curl of the knit fabric. It has no drape whatsoever. So a dress doesn’t seem like the best idea; it would look like cardboard.

Now I have a conundrum. How do I best use a yarn like this? Add mohair to give it some body and fluff? Go up in needle size to get a softer fabric and accept that it will be a bit see-through? Knit a sculpture instead of a garment?

I went to a local yarn shop. The visit did not go as planned.

My one goal was to buy a soft mid-weight yarn for a hat in a neutral-ish colour. Maybe like a nice hand-dyed grey or beige. Maybe they’d have something like the Malabrigo Rios I used for a pair of scarves but in a more subdued colourway.

(I need a hat to pair with my red leather jacket. My spring/autumn hat is red, and my gloves are red, and the overall impression of them all together is just way too red, so I need to break it up. And also, it is crazy that I am wearing my spring/autumn outerwear in January.)

Did I buy anything like that? Not at all. I came home with almost the opposite. Rosarios 4 Bulky Light Print is super bulky (not mid-weight) and definitely not a neutral colour. But it was so soft and I loved the colour so much.

I’ve never used a yarn even close to this kind of weight. You can’t really get a feel for it from the photo, I think – should have included a banana for scale. The hole in the middle of the knitting is the size of my fist, and each stitch is about the size of the nail of my little finger. Huge!

Using this yarn feels very different than my usual projects. It goes very fast, but also requires a whole other kind of attention than my usual knits; not something I could do while reading, for example. It’s nice to try something new! And I’ll get a hat out of it that definitely won’t be red. It remains to be seen whether I can wear it with the red jacket; it might be a bit too much. The sewing & crafts fair is coming up in a month, hopefully I’ll find an actual mid-weight hand-dyed grey yarn there.

I also bought material for a pair of felted slippers. I’ve never knitted anything with the intention of felting it, so that will also be entirely new.

The orange sweater is done.

Like almost all the sweaters I’ve made, there are things I like about it and things I don’t.

I like the fit and the construction of the Sweatrrr pattern, which is why I’m using it for the third time. It fits me perfectly around the neck and shoulders.

Just like last time I only used the basic construction and skipped the design elements. I used a simple 1×1 ribbing for the hem and cuffs and neckline this time. These came out really nice and tidy and look great.

The yarn is Monoceros by Apmezga, 100% hand-dyed merino. The overall colour is lovely, and the yarn feels very soft. It’s going to feel very comfortable to wear.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the yarn in the context of this sweater, though. The variegated colour worked out so-so. It led to ugly striping at first, and I did end up ripping back the body all the way to the start of the waist shaping and re-knitting without shaping. It fit better than I had expected; it drapes well enough that the boxier fit looks good on me.

The narrower, more even stripes on the re-knitted body aren’t bad. But because they’re not in sync with the width of the body, the stripes “travel”, so they end up looking slightly slanted. When I look at the sweater straight on, it looks like I’m not wearing it straight. I’m not sure what I think of that. And I’m not very fond of the abrupt transition from wide colour blotches on the shoulders to the super narrow striping on the sleeves.

Even though all four hanks of yarn were from the same dye lot, one was slightly different. It’s missing the smallest, darkest specks of brown. I didn’t see it before using the yarn – only when I switched from one hank to the next near the bottom of the sweater. Alternating two hanks didn’t help because it was not the abrupt transition that was problematic, but the fact that the skeins just didn’t match. I ripped that back and used the deviant hank for the sleeves, and now I can barely see the difference even when I’m looking for it.

Weaving in the ends of my latest knit sweater. I finished it last year already (ha ha) but I haven’t gotten around to finishing it. Very close now!

Leaving the house to give space to Ingrid and her friends for her birthday party, I went to the semi-annual crafts fair. Not intending to buy much, but I absolutely needed to visit Apmezga’s stand. For the last sweater I made with their yarn, I used three skeins of yarn and didn’t even wind the fourth one. I recklessly only brought three skeins for the current one. I’m almost at the end of the third skein and the sweater definitely isn’t finished. Unless I want a crop top. Which I don’t.

Apart from that, I bought a bag of wool felt scraps and some other assorted fabric off cuts. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but they were pretty and cheap so why not.

And of course I always photograph interesting knitwear, for inspiration for future projects. Right know I’m thinking of knitting a sweater or cardigan with a round yoke. I’ve done seamed set-in sleeves, contiguous shoulders of two kinds, raglan sleeves both top-down and bottom-up, but not a round yoke, so I’m curious to try it out.

Adrian usually joins me in my corner of the sofa when it’s time for him to do homework. If his homework is reading, we read side by side. If he’s doing something more active, like practising his French vocabulary, that tends to collide with my reading, and I knit instead. Today his homework was knitting, so we actually knitted together.

What would life even be if I didn’t have a knitting project underway?

This is the third basic sweater I’m doing from the same pattern, Sweatrrr by Åsa Söderman. I don’t agree with all the details (and indeed the first one is getting less use than it could because I dislike the hem and cuffs and neckline) but the fit and shaping around the shoulder and neck area is so perfect that I keep coming back to it.

The first one was in a grayish speckled yarn from MadelineTosh, and the second one a speckled greenish yarn from Apmezga. This latest one also looked mostly speckled at first but turned out to be more variegated than that, and now the sweater is coming out striped. The subtle, thin stripes towards the top were nice, but then as I started decreasing for the waist, the colours pooled more and more and I was getting strong tiger stripes instead. Not the look I was going for! I introduced a second ball of yarn and alternated between the two balls on every row, which mixed up the stripes, but also didn’t look anything like the top section. And then the first ball ran out, and the second ball on its own gave thick stripes again, but by that time I was doing hip increases and the stripes evened out after a while.

It all looks like a haphazard patchwork of different kinds of stripes and I am really not satisfied with it. The only way around it is to rip it up and reknit it without the waist shaping. Do I want a straight, boxy sweater? Preferably not… but I guess it might be better than this.

My current meeting knitting project is a pair of socks. Socks are great background knitting. But this last pair is not moving along. I knit a bit here and there but they’ve been underway for a long time without getting done. I’m almost avoiding picking them up to work on them. What is going on?

I realized today that I don’t much like the feel of them. I use standard sock yarn of 70% wool and 30% nylon for all my everyday socks. Or that’s what I thought, because I hadn’t paid attention to how different the quality can be. Today I touched the green half-done socks just after handling another pair and it struck me immediately. The wintery ones were soft and smooth; the green ones had fuzzy fibers sticking out here and there and felt rough in comparison. Even when I hadn’t consciously realized it, I felt it.

The green yarn is the leftovers of the first thin sock yarn I bought when I had just started producing socks for everyday use. (I hadn’t even discovered asymmetric toes yet.) Some cheap thing, bought online, sight unseen. I switched to small-scale hand-dyed sock yarns soon after, for prettier colours, but never compared the two side by side.

I’m three-quarters done with the second sock in the pair so I’m not going to give up now. I’ll power through and get these done, especially now that I know what my hang-up is. My feet probably won’t even feel the difference once the socks are finished. But my hands most definitely do – I’ve even given up on a yarn due to the feel. I’ll have to be more careful with my yarn buying in the future.

The super thick, super woolly sweater is done. Has been for several weeks already, but I didn’t get around to taking photos of it before we went to Estonia.

Looks stylish, doesn’t it? Too bad that I probably won’t get to wear it much outside the home, because I suspect it’ll be too bulky to fit under my (usually relatively form-fitting) coats and jackets.

The design and especially the construction of the triangular wedges comes from the Tell It Slant pattern, but I wanted a different fit and used a different yarn so I did the shaping myself, based on this tutorial for a basic top-down raglan sweater.

Overall it went smoothly. I had to make several attempts before I got the sleeve sizing right, but that’s par for the course. The only bit I struggled with was the neckline. I bound it off one way and it was too tight; I bound it off in a stretchier way and it was all floppy. I ended up using a weird hybrid of the two, where I alternated between the methods for every other stitch.