Learn It
Difficulty:
Category: Knitting
Type of item: Clothing
For: Women
Style: Classic, Cute
Materials
A friend owns a yarn shop, so I like to try to support her by using yarn from there for my projects. For this I used Elsebeth Lavold's discontinued Baby Llama.
What was your inspiration?
A trip to Iceland!
What are you most proud of?
This was an awesome class. I knitted this sweater to take on a trip to Iceland. I know I didn't use the right yarn, but this worked up close to the correct gauge--I just had to go up one size in the pattern to make it work. I was a little worried about wearing it in the land of Icelandic sweaters, but it was the only sweater I took and it was cold, so . . . I wore it everywhere for 6 days. I even wore it to the Alafoss factory store where the woman who helped me pick out yarn was extremely complimentary! I was so excited to have Icelandic knitters tell me they thought I did a good job on the project.
What advice would you give someone starting this project?
As you can see in the yoke photo, the baby llama yarn wasn't as sticky as Lopi. I should have done a more traditional steek (alternating colors from the row for 3 to 5 stitches on either side of the purl center stitch. As it is, some of the yarn is pulling out and I will have to do some repair work here. I think I can fix it and it will be OK. I used a different button band technique (from Kate Davies Needled blog) called the Steek Sandwich.
I like this button band technique especially because I could not find any ribbon in our small town and I wanted to have the sweater finished for our trip. It makes nice buttonholes and it looks pretty good. I knitted the inside of the sandwich in the green/blue color and that looks really nice. I did the final finishing bits in the car on the way to the airport. It was touch and go as to whether I would get it finished in time. We have a really long drive to the airport--four hours--and I got the last bits woven in about 20 minutes before we parked the car! I tossed the other sweater I had packed out of my suitcase and put this one in.
I'm so glad I took this class and I highly recommend it!
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