While I’m busy futzing around with the Widdershin Heel on these pesky Noro socks, I’d like to show off my green sweater!
Check it out! I’m wearing it, and it buttons and everything, and the pockets work! It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted, and though I screwed up the cable on it somewhere, I’m not showing that to you!
The Big Green
…almost became The Not-So-Big Green, because I decided that I needed to wear it to Debbie Stoller’s Son of Stitch ‘N Bitch book signing while it was still damp from the wet-blocking. I put it in the dryer. All principal measurements stayed the same, but in areas the cable looks just a wee bit less than crisp.
Ravelry link to The Big Green’s project details
The Stuff:
- Size 7 needles (26? circular, dpns)
- A little bit more than 6 skeins of Berocco Ultra Alpaca1
- 7 woven leather buttons2
Because this is my own pattern, the sweater measures a deliciously nonstandard 37? in circumference. It uses mostly standard top-down techniques, but I have to show you how rad the buttonband is IT IS DOUBLE-KNIT IN ONE PIECE WITH THE REST OF THE SWEATER, NOT SEWN ON OR PICKED UP. See how the placket kind of looks like a tube in the close up? It’s totally like a tube. The buttonholes are a double-knit variation of Barbara Walker’s bound buttonholes (Barbara Walker Treasury vol 2). I hereby give myself a high-five, because knitting the buttonband this way was kind of annoying but totally worth it. (I have buttonband issues.)
1 Someone on Ravelry said that the problem with Ultra Alpaca is that it looks old immediately. This is so true. This sweater looks about three years old, and it is brand new. WTF, Berocco. On the bright side, I love that it looks itchy but it is not actually itchy at all.
2 My grandfather had a bunch of old man sweaters with this kind of woven leather button on it. For that reason, I think of them as “grandpa buttons” or alternately “old man buttons”, and I also think they’re just about the best thing ever.
Just had to show you one unintended feature. Maybe I put that top button a little too high? It’s really warm this way, but I am told that I look like a psychotic elf or a green sperm, depending on who you talk to. I also look like my uncle Hoby, which is equally unsettling.
So this sweater marks a weird “first” for me: this is the first time in years that I am not really working on a new big sweater project. (Ravelers, don’t try to contradict me with the hibernating stuff in my notebook.) I don’t feel like I want another sweater now; I’m just kind of saturated. If you’re keeping track, in these last two posts I just said that I am currently interested in neither yarn acquisition nor sweater making. I must conclude that someone lobotomized me in my sleep.