Norræna hættuspil

14/365-2010: Norræna hættuspil, originally uploaded by elemmaciltur.

Well, I started off my 2010 knitting with a bang! Seems that the sweater-bug is not going to let me off easily (*touchwood* I want to keep knitting jumpers!) and here I go knitting myself a stranded-knitting pattern!

Norræna hættuspil, originally uploaded by elemmaciltur.

I have tried my hands at stranded-knitting before, but on smaller scales...I was too scared to do something on a big scale like a jumper. Besides, I'm not a big fan of the full-throttle pattern all over jumper either.

The pattern for this pullover had been on my Ravelry queue not for very long. For some reasons, I felt like knitting myself a stranded pattern jumper for a while now, but I didn't find a pattern that I like until I came across this one.

I didn't get around to starting this jumper for a while, mainly because I didn't have yarns for it and didn't really have the money to go buy yarns for it either. That was until I popped into a department store here and found this great cheap yarn ("Shetland Alpaka" from Schachenmayr Nomotta) there for EUR 2.50 a skein that came in a small assortment of heather colours. The fibre-mix (virgin wool, baby alpaca and mohair) seemed just perfect for stranded projects..and the exact colours for this jumper were also available...and so I thought: "What the heck?" and bought the amount called for for the jumper.

Norræna hættuspil, originally uploaded by elemmaciltur.

I knew from the beginning on that the yarn wasn't next-to-skin-wear material...it's just too scratchy. So, I decided from the beginning on to eliminate the turtle-neck and instead just do a round neck.

However, I found a huge problem with the pattern when I was about to finish knitting the body. I only noticed that something must have been wrong with the pattern when it said that I should stop knitting the body when I got 34 cm, whilst the next size up needs 42 cm. 34 cm? I would be showing my tummy when I wear this. That just couldn't be right, so I started looking at the original pattern in other languages and found out that I had been knitting the children's size! In all other languages, there are parentheses setting apart the children's size from the other...just not in the English translation!

Thank goodness for my slim figure, this won't change much, since I like a more fitted look anyway. So, I just lengthened everything according to the adult's small size and as you could see from the result, the jumper fits me perfectly!

(I also found out that in the German version, the ribbing is a 3x3 ribbing...whilst for the other versions, they are all 4x4 ribbing.)

The stranded-knitting part was great fun and a very good challenge for me. There were rows with three colours at the same time, which I had never done before. So, it was a good thing to learn. Apart from that, I think that I should also still try to keep my floats looser than I did...but at least they aren't too tight that the yoke pulled in or stitches got lost.

I also twisted the long floats the wrong way around in the first 3-4 rows of stranded-knitting, which resulted in those dimples you can see in the sweater. But thank goodness, I twisted the floats at the same place every time, so now it looks intentional.

Norræna hættuspil, originally uploaded by elemmaciltur.

All in all, I am extremely happy with how this jumper turned out. It is my first stranded-knitting jumper and also my first jumper with a yoke construction, which seems to work well with my body build, since it accentuates my otherwise narrow shoulders, making them look somewhat wider.

Lastly though, I'm sorry about the photo quality. I just couldn't wait to do a photo-shoot in natural light. Winter is sometimes a curse for photographers because of the lack of light. I resorted to using artificial light sources this time and make do with my editing - which I think I did a pretty good job on.

Well, that's it for my first post and first FO of 2010. I've already got the next jumper on my needles! ;-)