A Tale of Two Jackets redux…

I’ve mentioned this before many times in both my blog and in my lectures, I buy when it is time to buy, when I come across things at a great price, and I fill up my stash so I can be creative down the road with what I have.  I never have any plan for what I buy, and part of the fun is to make it actually work once I do.

Back in October of 2010, I came upon Lisa Merian of Spinner’s Hill, at a booth at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival.  I fell in love with her crazy ball, hand painted roving, from her cross bred Corriedale, Finn and Rambouillet sheep.

I sat on it for a couple of years, and it wasn’t until a trip to northern California and Thai Silks that I figured out I wanted to felt the crazy ball into a jacket.  I bought five yards of Silk Chiffon which was half price because it was a discontinued design.

I started to felt the jacket, got the fronts and back done, and then life got in the way.

January of this year, with an intern from the local community college, I set out to finish the jacket pieces, which if you were following my blog back then, you know how painful I think felting is, and that the goal here was a jacket, not to really be a better felter.

I achieved that goal, and I made the jacket from my standard Daryl Jacket pattern, the one I use for classes, as a sample for when I have a felter in one of my classes.  I love the jacket and it is currently on display at the Blue Ridge Fiber Show in Asheville NC. The hand couched trim is handspun from the leftover fiber that didn’t go into the jacket.

As a matter of fact, there were a lot of leftover fibers, in colors that weren’t that appealing, the muddy khaki green, gold, raspberry, and bits of yellow and cream.

I decided in March, to spin up what was left, into a few skeins of a bulky yarn.  I didn’t care where the colors that remained showed up in the skein, and just had fun one night, while I watched the Academy Awards.

I loved the result, and measured about 650 yards, which wasn’t a whole lot to do much with.  I looked at sweater patterns, and vest patterns, and wandered through my knitting yarn stash, which is so not extensive, there is very little in the drawers, but I came upon this angora/silk yarn, I had purchased in September 2011 in a knitting shop in Central Coast California.  It was in a bin marked $3. a skein, originally $25 and change.  A skein.  I bought one of each color they had and then sat on it.  I had originally thought of intarsia, and looked at a few patterns and decided that it would be more complex than I wanted, since I do knitting when I’m traveling or with people.  I do social knitting.  Following complex charts defeats the purpose of knitting for me.

The palette was exactly in line with the handspun. 🙂 ( I left out the teal.)

I chose this top down sweater pattern from C2Knits, though I will say it is my least favorite of her patterns (which I usually adore and most of what I knit now comes from C2Knits), but the shape would mostly work for what I wanted to do, just not in garter stitch.  And I could redesign the sleeves. The great thing about top down sweaters is the ability to knit until you run out of yarn, and then you stop.

I did a test swatch.

I kept redesigning the horizontal stripes as I was knitting along based on how I thought the yarn would work out.  I ripped regularly.

I finished up the body and sleeves and the collar of the garment, while I was in DC and Kentucky a few weeks ago, knitting the collar and lower edge of the garment simultaneously from the same ball of remaining yarn.  I had about 18″ of handspun yarn left when I was finished.

And I had a small amount of angora/silk left as well.  I was pretty proud of myself, for no other reason than I “used it mostly up…”

I got most of the ends tied in and the edging put on the front, after a couple of re-do’s, while I was at Sievers.  Which was pretty great because I ended up needing a warm sweater there, and I basically lived and slept in it.  Truth be told I was unhappy with the front edge, it looked OK, but the weight of the buttons caused the crocheted edge to roll inward.  Made me nuts.

One of the Sievers’ students, Ginnie I think, said to me, it probably needs a grosgrain backing to support the buttons.  That’s a pretty standard finish and I’ve done it on other sweaters, but the collar is designed to be rolled back like a lapel and expose the underside of the knitting.  I didn’t want to see grosgrain ribbon.

Ginnie said, well duh, why don’t you just weave your own!

I obsessed about it the whole time I was there.  The first thing I did when I got back from the city Monday night after flying into Newark that afternoon, was to set up my inkle loom with the remaining bits of angora/silk.  I hand measured all the remaining bits, to see what yardage I could get, and threw up a design based on how many ends each of what I had left.  I’m grinning the whole time.

I had a bamboo in the exact color of the selvedge edge of the band, to use as weft, and I was off.  I was supposed to demo all day yesterday at a local historic site, and though the loom isn’t historic, band weaving is, but the event was cancelled because of the horrific rains.  So I loaded up the wood stove, lit a fire and curled up in the living room with my inkle loom and wove off the two yard band in about an hour.

I love the way it coordinates with the sweater.

I hand sewed it to the back of the front edges, instead of the  traditional grosgrain, and now I have a new thing to do with my already trusty inkle loom, color matched grosgrain from left over knitting yarns. And of course the front lays perfectly…

Stay tuned…