aguas sweater, part 2 – swatchy swatchy!

Sunday, May 16th, 2010 | design, knitting, sweaters

So. Next step after the idea is the yarn! Sometimes these steps are switched; I’ll have a yarn and need to come up with an idea for it. For this sweater though, the idea definitely came first.

Malabrigo Sock in Aguas -

This yarn is 100% superwash wool (my fav), dyed with an all-over mix of blues/greens/turquoises. Some of the colours of Malabrigo are much ‘splotchier’, with distinct bands of each colour – I didn’t want something like that, because in my opinion it can really detract from the shape and stitch pattern of the sweater. All you end up seeing is the crazy colours (which is good in small doses!).

The yarn is 440 yards per 100g skein, very generous. I have four, for a total of 1760 yards. Should be more than enough, especially with shorter sleeves. I do tend to buy my yarn in sweater amounts, because really, my first love is knitting sweaters.

Next up – swatches.

This is the “knit-only rib” from Reversible Knitting on 3.75mm needles. I love the swatch in the book, and it’s a fun stitch pattern with just a two-stitch, two-row repeat. Reversible, of course, so that would work for the drapey front bits. (Please excuse the fact that the colours in these two photos don’t really match. It’s a tough colour to capture!)

However, as I got further into the swatch it became pretty obvious that this stitch pattern biases quite a bit. Because it’s garter stitch based, it’s also not as open of a stitch pattern as I was envisioning for this sweater. The biasing improved a bit with blocking (the swatch above has in fact been wet blocked) but it was irritating to knit it. Since this sweater is knit from side to side, it would also have been a bit of a problem to get the pieces to fit together properly!