Today's sweater starts with a curiousity about the world of neon. Super-bright colours have been a trend for a while now, and last year my curiousity about these colours reached a high point. During the summer of 2023, when visiting Magpie Yarns with my…
Today's sweater starts with a curiousity about the world of neon. Super-bright colours have been a trend for a while now, and last year my curiousity about these colours reached a high point. During the summer of 2023, when visiting Magpie Yarns with my mom, I treated myself to a copy of Aimee Gilee's book, Neons and Neutrals. And the sweater in that book that captured my attention the most, bar none, was "Wervel" by Maaike van Geijn. Last week, almost exactly a year after buying the book, I finished the sweater.
I got the opportunity to knit it when Pedro came to visit. His lovely wife, my friend Greta, works for Sweet Georgia Yarns, and offered to send some yarn up with him. She hooked me up with four skeins of Tough Love Sock in the colourway "Tumbled Stone," and two mini-skein kits: "Fruit Salad" and "Picnic in the Park." Put these two mini-skein sets together, and you get most of a rainbow, and I was confident this would be enough colours for me to design a neon-inspired Wervel.
Finding time for a purely "fun knitting" project like this has been a little difficult, but I decided early on this would be vacation knitting for me. So in the weeks leading up to travel, I made myself some colouring pages of the pattern, and spent lots of time deciding how I would arrange my colours. I ended up with this arrangement, which is pretty close to the original in where the values land.
There was a small complication, though. I did swatch, like a good duck, and found that I wasn't happy with the darkest blue in the "Picnic in the Park" set. It just wasn't dark enough in value to compete with the darkest "Fruit Salad" colour, and left the rainbow feeling a little weak.
I was at my mom's house at the time, so I ransacked her stash and found a special little sample skein of spindle-spun yarn that was just the right shade of rich cyan.
The complications were not over, however. Despite thorough swatching, my first attempt at knitting this complicated top-down yoke was a disaster. It ended up several sizes too big.
In this blurry selfie, you can see just how oversized it is. But, you can see some other issues that made me less upset than you might think to rip out and redo all of thus work. 1) the overall gauge is a bit floppy. 2) Especially wherever in the colourwork pattern a single stitch alternates with several stitches of a different colour, the stitch looks enormous - it's loose. 3) I didn't quite know how my of the spindle spun substitute yarn I had, so I was rather haphazard in how I used it.
I knit this whole yoke during my time in Maryland in May; I had really hoped to work on the stockinette section on the plane to Europe. However, re-knitting it was much easier. 1) I went down a needle size as well as two pattern sizes. 3) I changed my two-handed fair isle technique, wrapping my left-hand yarn for increased tension, and whenever a single stitch appears in one colour, that colour is in my right hand. 3) I used the spindle-spun yarn just for the pointy bits of the central diamond/losenge shape, and used the blue of the mini-skein set to in the center to contrast with the green and yellow. The new yoke is perfect.
The clever innovation of this pattern is that the body and sleeves of the sweater are knit with the main colour yarn held double, at a much larger gauge. There's a little bit of trickery to avoid puckering, which I thought was very clever. However, the interfacing of these too gauges was not as simple for me as the pattern assumed. I could have used large enough needles to simply half my stitches, but that would have been a very loose fabric. So I just did my own thing, figured out the gauge for a fabric I liked with the yarn held double, and changed my increase rate (and corresponding trickery) accordingly.
Now, let's talk about length. This pattern is for a cropped sweater, and I wanted to give a cropped sweater a try. I love the cropped-sweater-plus-dress (or high waisted skirt) look, but 95% of the time I am wearing jeans, so any sweater I make has to work with my jeans if I'm going to wear it in regular rotation. I bought the highest-waisted jeans I could find at Old Navy, and I made the body of this sweater to just hit the top of those jeans.
Also while at Old Navy, I picked up this summery dress - specifically to go with this sweater. I never do things like this - buying a cheap, fast-fashion, jersey-cloth dress, specifically for one sweater and season. But I've been washing it carefully to extend its short life, wearing it lots this summer, and it does indeed go perfectly with this sweater.
So, believe it or not, this is a cropped length on me. I've realized this summer that I have a very long torso. This is something Rachel talks about all the time, but it finally clicked for me this summer when I was trying to buy a one-piece swim suit. I can't do it. I actually bought one, but it was so uncomfortable because it couldn't give me proper coverage at the top and bottom at the same time. Unfortunately this meant I had to get another swimsuit, this time a two-piece with a long tank top that covers me much better. (Which is good, because we are living in the local pool in Northern Ireland.) Anyway, all that to say, I have a long torso, and a very high waist. Even the super-high waisted jeans I got this summer could be higher for my comfort. I'm just glad mom jeans are back in style, frankly. I tried wearing this sweater with jeans today, and I liked it. I had to remember to keep my shirt tucked in, but it wasn't that hard. I'm hanging onto the leftover Tumbled Stone - I have almost a whole skein - in case I change my mind and decide to lengthen it later.
As for the colours, I am pleased with my first neon effort. To me, this is all about the highlighter yellow that was the lightest colour in the "fruit salad" mix. I new I'd have to use as much of this as possible. It makes a delightful glow. It's not so neon as all that, but it is bright. A friend pointed out that it looks like Greenlandic Inuit beaded collars, which Kate Davies in her Yokes book pointed out may have a direct connection to fair isle yokes in Nordic fair isle knitting traditions. I like where it sits and how it feels.
I think I'm entering a more brightly coloured era. I've started to feel more and more as if I'm hiding in my standard palette of blues and earthy neutrals. I'm in my late thirties now, my hair turning grey at an accelerating rate, which feels as if it's changing my personal colour look already. As my body and hormones start to change, and as I put more of myself out there in the world, I feel more ready to stand out by wearing bright colours. This sweater is a delightful step in that direction.
I'm so, so happy with this sweater. Thanks for reading its story. Thank you Maaike for the beautiful pattern, Aimee for the inspirational book, and Greta for helping me out with the yarn! Tough Love Sock is an easy yarn to enjoy, and it comes in so many colours. It has a pleasing weight when held double, and seems to drape just right at the gauge I settled on.
We're about halfway through our time in Northern Ireland right now, and pretty well settled into ourselves and our limits. Jared is hiking the St. Patrick's Way, and I managed to bribe the children into doing a little hill walk with me while we were in Kilbroney Park to drop him off. Since the weather was perfect and I was loathe to let it go to waste. We made it to the top of Slieve Martin, but not before Dooner had to borrow an extra layer off me during the most exposed portion of our walk.
Ah, well, there's a statistically good chance it'll be hers one day anyway, so I'm glad she likes it!
Hope you're having a good week, friends. Happy belated birthday to the US and Canada both!
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