A friend of mine who very gratifyingly believes I’m capable of making anything asked me if I’d recreate a jumper she’d seen online for her. It was described in the listing as ‘crochet crop jumper’. I looked at it briefly and said, brimming with confidence, ‘Sure!’.
How naive I was, to believe the description. I thought ‘Crochet? No bother. It’ll be HDCs all the way, for sure’. I bought lovely soft yarn in a nice cream shade, picked up a pattern that was similarly shaped to get sizes from, and started on a ribbed collar one afternoon in a nice pub in London. I had the whole day to myself and this seemed a great way to spend it.
It was while making the collar that I zoomed in to the original photo for comparison. Reader: this collar was not crochet. It was very clearly knitted. Alarm bells should have sounded there and then, but I continued blithely on, thinking… I don’t know what. That the collar was knitted but the rest crocheted? Not impossible, but equally not exactly scalable for mass production. Still, I pressed ahead and finished up the collar, then started grappling with how best to make increases for shoulders.
It was around the fourth row that it dawned on me that my HDCs didn’t look like the jumper I was trying to recreate. The holes in that jumper are triangular, but I had regular squares all the way. So I zoomed in on the stitches, and confronted then properly for the first time. I was looking at knitting! What flavour of knitting, I had no idea, but those were unmistakably knit stitches.
Next.co uk
Sugar.
So since then – about a month – I’ve been periodically thinking it over, zooming in to the picture some more, Googling, and asking for help here on my blog. I tried a few stitch combination swatches and unravelled them in a huff. I tried slipping, increases and decreases, yos, dropped stitches… None of it looked right and, more to the point, none of it felt like a pattern I’d be able to easily knit up.
I went back and had another search, but this time looking in Ravelry for any adult sweater in sport weight with 4.5 or 5mm needles (at least I’d figured out what needle size I wanted). And there I found The Ivy Sweater (Ravelry link) by NEA Knitwear (Designer’s site). The Ivy has rows of twisted rib that looked something like the effect I wanted! If I could just throw in a row with yarn overs that should do the trick.
It’s ideal to have sizing and shaping instructions to work to, and while it’s a more oversize fit than the original target, one must be flexible, especially when one has been trying to figure out a pattern for a month. Here’s where I got to – my tension was woefully wobbly, I missed a row of purls, there were already two dropped stitches, and do those yos seem a bit gapey? I’ve unravelled it. The project continues…
I’ve added this post to the Unraveled Wednesday linkup, with thanks to Kat for hosting!
The Crafty Yarnster 