Sunday, December 18, 2022

Soldotna Sweater

 Now that the winter has set in (or as much as it ever does in Coastal California) my thoughts have turned to knitting. This is the Soldotna sweater, designed by Kaitlin Hunter.

I'm pretty much a color work newbie, but this pattern seemed very straightforward. The charts were easy to follow and, with no sleeves to bother with, I feel like I finished it in no time. By which I mean, in about 6 weeks. 

The trickiest part for me was choosing the colors. The charcoal was a given because I had 4 skeins of Louet gems in that shade that had been lounging in my yarn stash for probably at least 20 years. I thought it might be enough for this sweater, and it was, easily. 

So I just needed to find 3 colors of similar weight yarn that had enough contrast to show up. I ended up with cream, light grey and what looked in the yarn store like a new leaf green. Once the knitting commenced, though, that green read more as yellow. Which isn't one of my colors, but it's not right up against my face so I'm trying to think of it as my pop of color. It often seems like the pop of color in my projects ends up being a color I'm not too fond of. I guess because the ones I like are always the ones I choose for the main colors.

I made a couple easy changes to the pattern. For one, I lengthened the body quite a bit. Like by about 7 inches. When the designer says "cropped," she means cropped. I also fiddled with the charts a bit so that I didn't have any long floats on the backside. I'm not good at tacking those puppies down so they tend to catch on everything.

My goal is to watch some YouTube videos and learn about float management by the time I do my next color work sweater. I actually had enough fun knitting this sweater that I've already scrounged up yarn for my second version.

My Ravelry notes are here.


1 comment:

  1. It’s lovely, very striking. I like the colour work in your sweater. That is something I don’t usually try as I knit a bit too tightly and it’s such an effort to be consistent. I really like patterns that knit from the neck down, something I’ve rarely done, as they are much more satisfying than knitting in bits. Must do more. Thanks for your always interesting blogs and happy 2023 ( for us all).

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