Beauty Pageant Winner and the Beginning of a Design

After reading all the comments to yesterday's post, I'm worried I'm going to let y'all down with the selection I finally made. I hope you won't be surprised to find out that in this beauty pageant, the judges came in with a bias. And they weren't really looking for the most exotic. In fact, being simple was something of a positive quality.

Picking a yarn for my first real sweater design project was a challenge for me. Each one of those yarns in my stash has a great deal of appeal to me, but they all have different qualities that make them more or less suitable for a given design. For me, this meant I had to pick a yarn based on a design I had in mind, or I had to pick the yarn and then try to come up with a design that suited it's nature.

Like most things I do, the final reality was a combination of both things. For my first project, I wanted to do something with simple shaping, but something that was like something else in my wardrobe that I love to wear. Enter this garment:

Shape Inspiration Courtesy of J. Jill

As it turns out, it is fortuitous that this garment is black. It forces you to look at the shape and avoid the detailing. Essentially, this jacket is a jean-styled jacket. It hangs almost straight down from the shoulders to the hips. It can be easily worn over a turtleneck (my favorite winter shirt style) and it comes down just over the top of my hips. The thing that makes it special is that the bottom band of the jacket is a nice velvet instead of the corduroy that the rest of the jacket is made out of.

With regards to the yarn. I pawed, poked, prodded and petted all of my contestants. But I have to tell you that the pageant was a little bit rigged. The Sweet Grass Wool Targhee came into the competition as an odds-on favorite. In fact, I've been having dreams about designing a sweater out of this wool. (Yes, even I find it strange to be dreaming about grey yarn). Unfortunately, the design is not revealed in the dream, but it did suggest to me that something in my subconscious really wants me to do something about with this yarn. I don't let my Id out very often, but I decided that with a design project, it might be a good time to give it some sway.

So why is this yarn so inspirational for me? Well, you really have to touch it to understand. It is incredibly soft and springy. It reminds me of the perfect sweatshirt in wooly format. When I bought it from ThreadBear just about a year ago I did so because I wanted to knit it up into the sweater equivalent of comfort food. I'm not sure it would have the same qualities or be as inspirational for anyone else. But I do know another well known knitting chick who also has a stash of this stuff for much the same reason as I do (shh! don't tell her I told you). This stuff isn't your average boring grey yarn.

So with a shape and a yarn selected, I had to figure out how to bring them together. The first thing I figured I would do was swatch. There's no real gauge recommendations for the yarn, so I looked at other yarns in the same range and decided that I would do two swatches: one on US 10.5 needles and one on US 11 needles and see what I liked better. I addition, I also wanted to see how well the yarn would do in a simple cable (it's definitely too bulky for anything too ornate, and I'm not ready to design anything to complex) because I had no idea how well the texture would show up in the marled grey.

Two Targhee Swatches

The swatch on the left was done on US 10.5, the swatch on the right on US 11. Because I didn't want to get any strange surprises after knitting, assembling and washing the sweater, I not only knit the swatches, but I also washed and dressed them before taking the gauge measurements. As it turns out, this was a wise thing, because in both cases, I lost 1/2 stitch over two inches -- for instance, on the bigger swatch, before dressing there were 13 stitches/4", after dressing there were 12 stitches/4" (there was no real change in row gauge). This may not seem like much, but it means that if I used the undressed gauge to design from, after washing, the sweater would grow in width by 1.7" over a 20" initial width. Ouch! (A big thank you to Claudia whose post about discombobulating a rust colored Aran sweater inspired this test.)

After a great deal of consideration and touch-testing of the swatches, I settled on the one made with the US 11s. The why's of this are somewhat intangible, but it came down to the fact that the swatch just "felt" right to me at this gauge. It had the right amount of give and drape, wasn't too stiff, but still felt solid. Amazing the difference between 3 stitches/inch and 3.25 stitches/inch can make.

The Winning Swatch

This is a pre-washing picture of the swatch I selected (chosen for light conditions rather than size accuracy). The cable pattern comes from Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Patterns for Knitting. I've been fascinated with her knot-work patterns for sometime now, and was very pleased with the fact that this yarn shows off cable texturing well. To me, the effect is evokative of glyphs carved into stone, which seems a perfect complement for the Viking designs.

So where is this all leading? Thanks to the magic of PhotoShop, I provide a glimmer of what's going on inside my brain and is being scribbled out on paper.

The Beginnings of An Idea

Imagine that this is the right front of a cardigan-style sweater. One wide band of the cable goes up the vertical edge, and another wide band crosses the horizontal edge. That horizontal edging is carried around the back and provides the cuffs for the sleeves. Can you see where I am going? If not, there will be more to come as I work the idea out on paper.