Hello Internet Friends!
Today I’m super excited to share with you the end of the #knitterscurse with my completion of a sweater for the fluffy blonde monster :D
For those who may not know, the knitters sweater’s curse is a ‘legend’ that loosely states that you should not knit a sweater for your significant other until ‘they’ve put a ring on it’ because you will then be cursed and the relationship will end prior to the completion of the sweater. Now some of you may be skeptical about such things, however I wasn’t willing to put our 8 year relationship on the line just in case it turned out to be true (plus what would I do with a half finished men’s sweater?)
This sweater started as a conversation between us last year before knit city 2017, I told him that now that we were engaged I could ‘finally’ knit him a sweater and I had hand picked a few options for him from Ravelry. Out of all the options that I thought he would like (he has very specific tastes, nothing with a crazy design, but also some design element to keep it interesting) I only selected one fingering weight sweater, Norah Gaughan’s Jackdaw sweater. Of course, he proceeded to pick that one, not the nice bulky weight cable cardigan, or the worsted weight ribbed pullover….the fingering weight cabled sweater is what he liked. Personally, I think he liked it because he identified with the model on the cover of the pattern....... Anyways off I went to knit city to purchase a man’s sweater quantity of Brooklyn Tweed Loft in the Soot colourway.
So I started knitting, and knitting, and knitting and knitting.....and that’s when I realized that this was not going to be as simple as when I knit sweaters for myself….the scale of difference between myself and the #fluffyblondemonster is huge! Just looking at the stitch count alone should have clued me into the fact that this was going to take a while.
Side bar: I wonder if part of the sweater curse is due to differences in size between the knitter and the partner of the knitter. Perhaps it grew out of a group of smaller knitters knitting for partners much larger than themselves…….and the knitters not realizing how much more time it takes to hand knit a garment for someone much larger than themselves…..?
Anyways, many months later (with *ahem* many other personal projects for myself finished in between :D) I finally finished the #fluffyblondemonster’s sweater. It was a labor of love, and of me shaking fistfuls of half finished knitting at him swearing that ‘he better wear this sweater all the time or so help me!’ :D So love, lots of love :D
We took advantage of a sunny day before all the rain started to go shoot some pictures of him in his snazzy new sweater on a hike up cypress mountain. Did I make him pack his sweater and jeans to change into when we found a good spot for pics on this hike? Yes, yes I did. Why? Because Blogging :D Also, now it was his turn to be in front of the camera…..muhahahahahahaha! Normally, he’s the one taking pictures of me for the blog and he passes the time by making funny faces and asking me to strike funny poses......now the shoe is on the other foot! But I think he enjoyed the experience over all ;)
In terms of knitting modifications I knit between sizes 43 and 48, this is because we compared the final measurements of the Jackdaw sweater to one that he already owns that he likes the fit of and it was in between the two sizes. I also lengthened the body by about an inch and the sleeves by and inch and a half, again all based upon the comparison of the knitting pattern schematics and his RTW sweater. Over all I think the sweater fits really well! I could probably have done without the extra inch and a half on the sleeve as he has to roll them up now but the extra length on the body was spot on. The only tricky thing with this cardigan is how to ‘style’ the collar...since it’s a fold over collar you do need to pull the sweater forward more to get the shoulder seams to be on top of the shoulders before you start to fold the collar or else the sweater looks unbalanced.
One last funny story with this sweater, as many knitters who have used Brooklyn Tweed loft it is recommended that you either seam with a different yarn of a similar weight and colour with more tensile strength or to add additional strength by twisting the yarn as you seam. I personally have never had problems seaming with loft but in this case I didn’t have that as an option as I used all of yarn knitting all the parts of the sweater. I dug through my stash and found some grey tweedy yarn that I had used years ago, I seamed up with this yarn with minimal problems and proudly gave the sweater to the #fluffyblondemonster. After a few uses (yay he was actually wearing it!) he noticed a hole in the sleeve on the bicep :O turns out that the yarn I had used for seaming wasn’t quite up to the task and had broken, I joked he was ‘selling too many tickets to the gun show’ and flexing too much which broke the seam! I’ve gotten some other, stronger yarn to seam with so hopefully I can repair the hole and reinforce any loose looking parts! Fingers crossed that he wears this sweater for years to come!
