Alive & Knitting

I’ve managed to do a bit of knitting during the residency – in between the reading and critiquing and meeting and blogging! – and I finished Mr. C.’s Kauni fair isle sweater a while back. (You may remember me talking about the swatching and the pattern choice HERE.)

When it came off the needles, it looked like this:

It sat for a bit while I worked up the nerve to throw the completed sweater into the washing machine. I had to do it, because I had knit the sweater 10% too big to allow for the shrinkage in washing. It didn’t fit him, so into the pillowcase it went, then into the machine. That was a stressful 45 minutes! But it came out beautifully soft and 10% smaller.

It had to sit a few days more before I was ready to sew in the zipper. I always fret about sewing zips in with the machine, but not enough to baste them by hand first. This one, as has recently been the case, went in perfectly the first time.

Since then, Mr. C. has had it on his back and I’ve been trying to get it from him to take a picture of it! Here it is, all done:

Yet more proof that I’m not a photographer! Unfortunately, you can’t feel how much the wool softened in the washing machine. It’s incredible. The sweater is so soft now that you wouldn’t think it was the same yarn. It didn’t felt – it just fulled and shrank.

For this sweater, I used the Kauni Rainbow colourway for the bright bits, but not all of the colour repeat. The purple, turquoise and green bits didn’t contrast enough with the purple, navy and blue background, so I broke them out of each repeat. I had a whole pile of these pieces left, so I knit something else with them. I’ll show it to you tomorrow.