Winter Wrap-Up

I thought I would keep the momentum going with wrapping up old projects to try to get as much done as possible before the motivation fizzles out. Continuing the trend of my last post, I have another finished sweater to share!

This pattern is Timberline, by Jared Flood. I knit most of these sweater pieces in 2021 before we moved to North Carolina, but I think perhaps half a sleeve waited until last year, and then I never got around to sewing the pieces together until recently.

I bought the yarn for this sweater at the Minnesota Sheep and Wool Festival (Shepherd’s Harvest) in 2018 with the intent of knitting a cabled cardigan, so this project was five years in the making. The yarn itself is a great blend of 85/15 wool/alpaca that came from a local shepherd and I was really excited to snatch it up. In fact, I contacted her after the festival to order even more and she very graciously sold me several additional skeins to make sure I wouldn’t run out.

I love how three-dimensional the cables are in this fabric and the natural color of the wool really lets the texture sing.

The ceramic buttons are from a seller on Etsy, though it looks like she is no longer a vendor so I won’t link to the shop here. But I do love the rustic quality of the handmade buttons, I think they go really well with the sweater overall.

This sweater is a great companion to another that I made for Kyle, out of wool from the same vendor. Kyle wasn’t able to accompany me to Shepherd’s Harvest in 2018 because he was busy galivanting around Ireland with family. He did, however, send me this candid photo of a man in a pub with a caption “I want this sweater.”

And so I did my best to take that blurry photo and design a sweater for him that would be an approximate recreation of the sweater he loved. I finished this sweater in 2019, but never took any photos until now.

I didn’t have a lot to go off with the picture he sent, but I think I did a pretty decent job! I took some “artistic liberties”, but the cables and shawl collar I think were the most important.

Designing my own pattern was not as simple as following someone else’s, and I had a major issue in my calculations in that I didn’t really take row gauge into account when planning my decreases for the yoke. The first iteration of this sweater ended up with armholes that were so long they reached almost down to Kyle’s elbows!

I had to rip out the collar, and the body/sleeves to below the underarms and completely reknit the top half of the sweater. That was a good opportunity to also adjust how I constructed the collar, which was previously way too wide and floppy to be functional. I finally ripped it all out in December of 2020 to re-do everything.

Even after reknitting everything, the ball of yarn above is what I had leftover from ripping out the yoke! That’s a lot of fabric that I had taken out that didn’t go back in. Not every success is a straight line, but I got there eventually. And now we have complementary sweaters to remember our time in Minnesota, and Kyle’s trip to Ireland.

On the subject of great complements, I also recently finished a hat that I knit a year and a half ago. Truly the only thing I had left to do was close up the top of the hat, weave in the ends, and block it. I don’t know why I waited 18 months to get that wrapped up.

Where the complement part of this hat comes in is that I had used the leftovers from when I knit this same design back in 2020. By simply reversing the colors, I had enough yarn left to make a second hat.

The original hat with the gray brim has been one of my favorites since I made it and it is my go-to hat when the wind is blowing. The yarn was a limited run created by The Yarnery as part of their “Northern Farms Project” – creating truly local yarn, with the fiber sourced and spun in the upper Midwest. Because there would never be more of this yarn made, I didn’t want my leftovers to go to waste and I was glad to be able to use every last inch. I had to stop the colorwork a few rows short because I ran out of gray, and the few yards of cream I had leftover were used to seam my Timberline cardigan, so it all went to good use.

I did discover this broken thread after blocking the hat which will need to be repaired before anyone wears it, but that should be simple enough to do (famous last words). Hopefully I don’t wait another 18 months to get that done!

It seems my focus has shifted to knitting for the majority of my projects lately, but I did recently pull out a quilt top that I pieced together in July, 2020. I have always referred to this as my “winter” quilt and fully intended to have it finished and ready to use the same year I started, but as we’ve seen here sometimes projects have to wait a while before it is their turn to shine.

I had bought a thick wool batting for this quilt so that it would be extra warm, but never made any more progress after making the top. Just this past week, inspired by Kyle’s recent enthusiasm for sewing, I pulled this out again and pieced together all of my scraps to make a large enough piece of fabric for the backing. Now comes the time-consuming part of sandwiching the top, batting, and back and doing the actual quilting to join it all together. Then I’ll bind the edges and maybe, just maybe, I’ll have a new quilt to use before this winter is over.

And if that wasn’t enough, I also recently did some more natural dyeing. Black walnuts were ready for harvest a little over a month ago and someone in the community gave Kyle two large buckets full of the hulls for me to use.

I tried two different yarn bases, and for each I dyed one skein with just the black walnut hull (left), and then added iron as a modifier to the dye to see if it would darken the color (right). I had expected the iron to have a more significant effect and was hoping for a really dark, chocolatey brown. Honestly, I’m not sure why the color is so light. I used so much plant material the water was almost sludge, but the wool didn’t take the dye as well as I anticipated. All is well though, I love this medium brown and I got some nice subtle variation in color across the four skeins.

Phew! I think that’s enough projects for one post. I wish you all a happy and gentle holiday season.