Sunday, November 30, 2008

My Psychedelic Sweater

I'd like to say here, at the outset, that I don't normally wear bright colors. I usually wear dark and muted-colored clothing and try to project a professional image in my work attire. I say this because my latest sartorial creation is uncharacteristically exuberant. The back story is that I've been quite taken with Kauni effektgarn in the rainbow colorway. At the same time, I found a beautiful brocade pattern by Kim Hargreaves and decided to combine the two. I'm still not sure if it was a completely compatible marriage of yarn and pattern.


The original pattern was for a vest and you can see that in the shaping, which I do like.

The process of putting together the sweater began with cutting the steek ...


... and then designing a sleeve pattern. Again, this was taken from a vest pattern, so I had to figure out what design to use for the sleeves. I decided to take a small motif from the pattern on the front of the body which you can see here:

However, making the rest of the sleeves all black did not work. I thought it would tone down the vivid colors of the sweater, but it just looked as though it was from a completely different sweater. So, after this false start, I decided to combine the flower motif from the front with the stripes from the back of the body. I also decided to use a "Siamese" or "twin steek" in order to keep the color changes as consistent as possible across the two sleeves.

Fraternal twins, separated at birth:

Here are some further project details if you're still with me:

The pretty leaf design in the front blended together too much and I don't really care for the combination of green and orange, so I used double-stitching to highlight the pattern in blue.

Meanwhile, the buttons bring out the red.




A bientot!





3 comments:

RobbinMT said...

This is stunning! I am so impressed - and inspired! I had never heard of /thought of "Siamese Steeks" before! WOW!!!! Thanks :)

Pinneguri said...

Amazing! You are so good! I appoint you to be among my 10 most highly regarded knitter. Not only this project, but many of your others too ... wow!
It worked very well with the stripy pattern against the leaves, and the way you worked out the sleeves ... You are good!

Anonymous said...

Fabulous and elegant.

Now, do not let anyone wash it for you.....