The Heathen Housewife

Let’s review the story of Shelly’s Spiral Sweater so far…It all started out last June. June! Really?! I can’t believe it’s been that long. Soooo sorry for letting it drag on this way. Freakin’ June. Sheesh.

Anyway, I came up with this totally new-to-me idea for constructing a sweater. A way to show off some handspun yarn I’d worked up. I was pretty excited about it from day one. So excited that I cranked that first one out pretty quickly. So excited that I ran outside the moment it was finished and forced my nice neighbor to take my picture quick so I could show it off to the world. You can even see there is still a stitch marker and an unwoven end hanging down at the bottom. And I’m sweating like a pig in that picture because it was way too hot outside to be wearing a handknit sweater.

And apparently my excitement rubbed off a bit, because a few people expressed an interest in knitting a sweater like it, and I decided a knit-along would be fun. I scrounged through my stash and found some yarn for a second sweater, and wrote up a post full of tips on what kind of yarn to buy and how much. So far so good.

Next, we jumped right in with the beginning of the spiral, which doubled as a gauge swatch. I started that second sweater with a different stitch pattern than the first, and handed out charts for both. I was just wearing that second sweater today. I love that bobbly stitch pattern, especially in the fingering weight yarn.

The next post was a little scary, maybe. There was some blocking, some measuring, and even the dreaded math. But it was simple math, and there was a sleepy cat thrown in for good measure, so some of you held with me and kept the momentum going.

Meanwhile, there were lots of good questions and answers going on over at Ravelry.

It takes a lot more time to crank out a sweater in teeny tiny stitches on fingering weight yarn than it does a worsted-weight sweater. Especially when there are bobbles involved where none were before. But I was knitting obsessively, and it wasn’t too long before I had another post up getting through the math on the sleeves.

And then things started to loose steam a bit. A few weeks went by without another KAL post. I was sneaking along on a secret gifty project – well, maybe two. I know there was a pair of socks and a baby blanket somewhere along the way. Maybe I’ll get around to blogging those eventually. Finally, I put together a pretty good description of how to pick up the stitches for the yoke, how to set up the underarm stitches and markers for the joins.

And then – then I freakin’ left you hanging! Yikes! Partly because it felt a bit overwhelming to explain the three or four things that need to happen all at once to make the yoke happen. It’s a lot easier to knit them than it is to write them down. And figuring just how much detail is enough, and yadda yadda. Eventually, I decided to get serious and just write it up as an honest-to-goodness pattern so that the effort could double as a class-teaching tool.

So I kind of dropped everything to knit up a third sweater – one made out of yarn from my lovely LYS so that they can hang it up as a shop model. Only really, that was the fourth sweater because I knit one for Sophie that I never told you about. I better back up.

Some time over the summer, I heard about a design contest that a big yarn company was holding for their sock yarns. I was feeling so stupid-excited about my little idea that I thought “why not?” and I went and bought a pile of sparkly sock yarn and made a Sophie-sized sweater. I think it is super-cute. Especially on Sophie.

I used another new stitch pattern for the lace, and I figured that it would count as an unpublished design since I certainly hadn’t published it in a child’s size and I’d changed it up with the stitch pattern and the yarns.

Well, Sophie was thrilled with the sweater. Still is, although she hadn’t gotten to wear it much till last week because when it came back from the contest she only had it for a few weeks before I snuck it off to the yarn shop to serve as a model till the real shop model was done. The contest was a wash. I got a nice form letter back saying they had lots of lovely designs and it was very hard to choose, yadda yadda. I also got the fall line of pattern pamphlets from the company, and I can’t complain. You throw the dice, you take your chance…maybe next time, right?

Okay, and then at some point I finished the green and yellow sweater. I really wasn’t all that thrilled with the neckline. I’m still not entirely thrilled with it, and that was another one of the things that held me back from finishing the KAL. I wanted a third go at the neckline before I told a bunch of strangers on the internet how to do it.

The good news, looking at this picture, is that I’ve lost a couple pounds and gained more tone from swimming since then – the tummy bulge is definitely getting smaller. Because I know you all were just dying to hear about that, right?

Alright, and at some point Julie was starting to feel pretty down-and-out about everyone else getting handknit sweaters but not her. I knew she’d want a cardigan, and also there had been some discussion early on about what a cardigan version of this sweater would look like. As much as I love steeks, I still stand by my claim that a steeked version of this would be a bad, bad thing. Mostly because the spiral shape would make the thing hang all wonky, and the button band would break up the lines of the spiral making it pointless anyway.

I dug around in my stash and found a pile of pink Malabrigo-like yarn left from the closing of a LYS a few years ago – they’d tried to sell a line of their own yarns, and unfortunately it dragged them down. Julie is a pink-crazy girlie-girl, so I started this sweater for her. And then she started talking about wanting me to knit her a PowerPuff Girls dress (she’s a bit obsessed with the PowerPuff Girls – long story).

So I added a black stripe a la Blossom. She loves it and wears it a lot. But she did get tired of posing for me pretty quickly.

Oh, hai! Also, that was my first time sewing a zipper into a sweater. It wasn’t hard at all, although my first try with the sewing machine went completely wrong. I ended up sewing it in by hand, and it worked fine.

And finally, the shop model, made from Mochi Plus yarn. I think it turned out really well. It’s in a smaller size, so I had to ask my model-thin friend V to come over and try it on.

I used the original stitch pattern for this one, and modified the neckline so that I’m now quite happy with it.

And that is how I ended up knitting five spiral sweaters in six months without managing to finish the knit-along over here on the blog. And I know some of you are sitting at your computers reading this and thinking “I know! Hand over the rest of the instructions already, you jerk!” And you have every.single.right. in the world to be royally pissed at me right now.

So here’s the deal. I’m going to e-mail y’all a .pdf of the finished pattern. Those of you who’ve been playing along from months and months ago. Do me a favor and send me an e-mail from the account where you want your .pdf sent. I’m going to go post this on Ravelry too, so hopefully I’ll catch everybody. I’ll tell you what – this is a new, untested by anyone else but me pattern, so if you want to knit one up, go ahead and send me an e-mail in the next week or so and I’ll get you a copy as well. All I ask is that you let me know if you find any problems with it. That’s the first way I’m going to try and make it up to my KAL-ers.

Secondly, anyone who is willing to e-mail me a picture of their finished project and allow me to post about it, and/or put their finished project up on Ravelry within the next month or so is getting a prize package from my very own stash. I will put together something special for each person based on a little questionnaire that I send you. I have a very large stash with a lot of nice stuff. I owe you all for not burning me in effigy. Packages may include things like sock yarn, spinning fiber, possibly some of my handspun, copies of my other patterns, little knitting notions, maybe a book, who knows what else. It will be a nice surprise, I promise.

Oh! And the yarn store is letting me teach a class on this. It’s going to be on Wednesday evenings starting March 3. This sweater is a great way to try lace for the first time since you’re knitting only a narrow strip back and forth and it’s easy to keep track of the pattern, and ripping back is almost painless if necessary. The worsted weight version knits up quickly, and it’s a great exercise in understanding how a raglan sweater works. It’s super-customizable and can be flattering on most body types. And I make cookies for my students.

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