Sunday, April 22, 2012

Easy Peasy!

Well not so Easy:

I have to admit that I am a bit of a snob!  I LOVE lovely yarn. I admired the yarn from Louet called Mooi first because its name means 'lovely, nice, yummy' in Dutch.  This yarn contains 70% bamboo, 15% cashmere and 15% bison.  I had the opportunity to pick up a small order and  I chose a few colours in the lace weight and a slightly larger selection of the Sport weight. 

A few skeins sold and I made a sample shawl, but at $45 and $30 a skein it really was too expensive for most knitters.

During March Madness I decided to put them all on sale.  They still sat.  Then I found Peasy a lovely sweater on Ravelry. I had 6 skeins of the aqua. The pattern said I would need 680 - 1200 meters I had 780.  (I am not the small size )  I took a chance and decided that I could cheat a little and make the sleeves shorter.  It is a top down pattern so I told myself (over and over) that I could make it work.

I began, it was clear I wasn't going to have enough to make the long sleeves.  I made the sleeves to the elbow, each using one half of a ball.  (I knit and then weighed the remaining on a scale to be sure they were even.)  Still it was not going to be enough.  I played with the idea of using a contrast colour for a colour detail for the bottom. (but it wasn't what I had in mind)  There was a skein of laceweight, actually there are 2, I was saving those for something else.  I decided that if I doubled the yarn and used it for all of the garter stitch details I would have enough.

I finished the sweater and tried it on.  It was about an 1" - 2" shorter than I would really like.  The sleeves were a funny length.  I ripped back all the garter stitch, the two button bands and the bottom border and shorted the sleeves then  re-knit the borders on the sleeves.  Using every inch of the frogged yarn I was able to add about 1" to  bottom of the body and re-knit the garter stitch bands and bottom edge.  It blocked beautifully. I found some lovely buttons in my button collection at home.


It's lovely and perfect.



You don't really even want to know what its actually worth.

2 comments:

Paula said...

The sweater looks great and the yarn does sound yummy. I made Peasy in little girl size and it's a great pattern.

Paula

Anonymous said...

It's lovely Tina!!

Regan