Knitting the Knitter's Almanac - March

I wasn't idle for three months while I waited for yarn to complete February's projects.  Instead, I started and finished March's project in the interim.  March's project is a sweater in three colors.  The pattern is a combination of the color work of Fair Isle knits with the flowing lines of Aran designs to create a trellis type motif.  It's a fairly easy pattern, but of course knitting a large sweater takes time. 



Chainmail Hat

As usual, we started with a hat to get a sense of our individual gauge and to practice the pattern.  My hat came out a little snug for my head, and I'm not as pleased with the tapering at the top as my last hat, but it looks fine nonetheless. 

Ms. Zimmermann starts the chapter with a discussion of how much yarn to buy, clearly an area I've been having trouble with.  I'd like to pretend that I managed to purchase the right amount of yarn this time around, but that would be untrue.  I did realize I had purchased too little before I started knitting though, so I went back and got more.  And I'm happy to report that I had enough to finish the project after that.



Chainmail Sweater

For the sweater, I decided to make some adjustments to the pattern as written.  To begin with, EZ's instructions for the sweater were the same as January's Aran sweater - a large tube with tapered tube sleeves stitched in.  I thought that it would be interesting and educational to use her formula-based baby sweater pattern from February to knit an adult sweater.  So I do the necessary math to create a cardigan sweater using the chainmail motif.  I then adjusted the motif pattern slightly to reflect the ratios of yarn I had purchased to be sure I was using it evenly and wouldn't run out of one color too soon.  After my initial design work I set to knitting (and knitting and knitting - sweaters take forever!).  I knit til I ran out of the darkest color wool I was using for the vertical lines, then finished the bottom ribbing and cast off.  The sweater turned out to be just the right size and I had very little of the other two colors of wool left over, so all around a success in wool purchasing (at least by my standards).



Close up of color change

One other technique introduced in this chapter was a color blending technique using purl stitches on the first row with a new color.  The result is a more gradual color change than simply knitting the row as usual.  It's rather hard to describe, but if you look at the close up, you can see that where the two colors join with knit stitches there's a jagged edge, but where they are joined with purl stitches, there's a raised bump of the old color in the field of the new color.  Close up it's not particularly attractive, but from afar, the color change looks more blended and less sharp.

I feel like there were fewer new techniques and lessons in this chapter than the two previous ones, but I still gained a lot from knitting this sweater.  I'm looking forward to the next few months of practice and improvement.