As I inch my time through life towards becoming an old lady, I thought why not speed up the process a little. Being a little old lady at heart in my early 20s is cool, right? Right.
Anyhow, winter serving as an excuse - ahem, WinterLikeOnlyNorthernCanadaKnowsHowToMake (and possibly Siberia, but that's far) - I decided to undertake a rather large knitting project. Large by my standards. It's not yet another giant scarf, those are actually quite easy, they're simply time exhaustive. It is a lovely sweater. After knitting a rather funny elfish hat with bells and using the leftovers for hand-warmers, I wanted an excuse to use the lettlopi yarn again. It's such a breeze to knit with; it has a wonderful, fuzzy texture, it's light and airy, and it's 100% pure icelandic sheep wool. And the Gods only know how much I love working with completely natural fibres. Acrylic can't compete with this stuff. From personal experience, pure synthetic fibres can't hold a candle to the natural ones. Even though technically acrylic is slightly warmer than wool (exact citation in a textile textbook somewhere in a box, packed away), it doesn't breathe as well, it's not as comfortable, and it doesn't retain as nice an appearance once a garment is knitted.
The pattern I used is found here: www.ravelry.com veurfringurinn/weatherman
Available in both English and Icelandic, nominal cost of $6 US dollars. It's a simple pattern, excellent for a first time sweater project.
It seems typical for icelandic sweaters to be done in this sequence: knit the body from the hem up, knit the sleeves from the cuffs, join the body and sleeves in the round, work the pattern and the decreases in the yoke, knit the collar. And bam: wearable coziness. Don't skip over the blocking step. It's important if you want the sweater to fall properly. Plus, it smells like lanolin (wet sheep) while you steam it and it's great. Yes, trust me.
When you think about it, hand knitting is definitely not the right craft if you want to make a buck or two. It took about two and a half months of work - evenings and weekend-free time - to complete this piece. Cost for the balls of yarn came to about $65-70 CAD. So now you know, if someone ever gifts you a handmade sweater, it's worth gold. Seriously. There are no other pieces like it, and so much time and effort went into it, you better treasure it until the end of eternity.
As per usual, my efforts to document this project have been concentrated at the end of the process, hence there are only pictures of an almost completed, and completed sweater.
Colour work
Kitty helps
Done knittng
Blocking
Tah-Dah
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