Sweater Surgery

When I was at the Goodwill picking up a sweater to make into swants, I found an amazing fair isle sweater.  I wish I had taken a picture of it; it was a big, boxy 80's drop shoulder number made of some sort of hearty nordic wool.

But it was a giant men's sweater.

So I ripped it apart and am attempting to change it into a set-in sleeve sweater that will fit me (this is a really good description of the different kinds of shoulders, if you care).  The sweater was serged/overlocked together at the edges, so I just cut away the side seems.

Because it was a drop-sleeve sweater (and I have giant ape arms), I need to add a lot of length to the sleeves.  I happened to have some yarn that matches the yellow and white yarn already in the sweater.  I picked up the stitches where the sleeves were serged to the body of the sweater.  Now I am knitting until they are long enough, adding the proper shaping in as I go.

I also had to change the body of the sweater from a big rectangle into a set-in shape.  I mapped out the middle of the sweater and then how wide I wanted the shoulders and waist to be (in the neon thread you see) based on my measurements.

Then I cut the sleeve holes.  Cutting knitting is nerve-wracking, but the yarn is sticky enough that it doesn't unravel too much.

I left the original collar.  So now I just have to finish knitting the sleeves and then sew it all together on the sewing machine. 

Backdated Knitting

Looking at the blog archives, I realize I didn't post a single thing in 2013. I was knitting that whole time, I just never updated you all.

 One of the things I made was Funchal Moebius by Kate Davies.  Go ahead and click that link.  You will notice that it is a long, double-sided, two-color fair isle moebius scarf.  You can wrap it twice around your neck.

Mine doesn't look like that.

I did a few repeats of the pattern, said, "well that was fun" and decided it was a cowl.

I just put a little i-cord bind-off on both ends.

You can see how it was supposed to be a double-sided scarf instead of a cowl.  The colors are inverted on the opposite sides.

Wouldn't that be a pretty sweater pattern?  But if I get this tired of color-work this quickly I can't imagine doing a whole sweater like this. 

Espionage

Every year I go to Target and scope out what is new in knitwear fashion (a.k.a. to get mad that stores charge for something I could make myself and/or can charge so little for what would take me FOREVER to make myself)

More flip top mittens.  But these have entrelac on the hand.  Interesting.

Also seems to be a bunch of Fair Isle this year.  If I had the attention span, these are what I would make.

These, not so much.  You can't tell, but a couple of these are scarf/hood combinations.

Would look like this laid out flat.  Cool or not cool?

Vogue Knitting appears to agree with Target that fair isle is fashionable:

But I question the taste of that first hat and of wearing a wool cap with a tank top...but maybe that's just me.