Sweater WIP Week - Saturday: Acorns

Finally! For the first time since Monday a non-Amimono design! ;)

This is Acorns [Rav link] from the new Fall 2010 Twist Collective, designed by Carol Sunday. It was published early August (or late July?), and is now the 3rd most popular pattern from this issue, with 43 projects listed on Ravelry. Mine is one of them. You may remember me putting some nice words on this issue of Twist Collective in a previous post.

The pattern is 7 pages long, and I have read forum posts by people complaining that it is hard to sit and knit in their usual place when having to look at 3-4 different pages at once to figure out what's going on (written instructions on construction/shaping is on one page, the chart on another, chart legend on a third (at least in the beginning), and chart legend explanation on a fourth). I understand what they are on about, but I have to say that once you get past the first row or two of Acorns, it gets easier to remember, and you only need to pay attention to the shaping constructions and the chart.

That being said, I am very happy to have learnt a new way of making neat increases in rev St st from knitting this one! In total, the pattern uses 3 different kinds of increases (times 2 because there's always a left version and a right version), but two of these are actually the same being the St st and rev St st versions of each other. I already know another two ways of increasing, so I think I should be pretty well off in that department by now ;)

What you see here is actually my second attempt at this cardigan. I started out in a different yarn - New Lanark DK in Pebble - and not paying too much attention to what kind of increases should be used, thinking I knew better (I was wrong*). As it turned out, this otherwise wonderful yarn was not right for the project - a bit too 'rustic' for showing off the acorns pattern - so I started over using a much less rustic yarn, namely Rowan Pure Wool DK (colourway Kiss). In fact, this yarn has (in my opinion) such an industrial, smooth look to it, that the colour becomes quite flat. Therefore, I paired it up with a strand of Holst Garn Supersoft in another (but deliberately not exactly similar) red colour, Poppy. A match made in heaven for this project, if you ask me ;)

I started the first version on August 2nd, and I am now at the point where I've just divided for body and sleeves. That means the fun part is almost over, but I'm confident it'll be done in a few months...My Ravelry project page is here.

*You may be interested in why I was wrong, if you're into knitting techniques. When doing increases, I often do like this: make a yo, and then twist and knit it on the next row to avoid the squeezing-together of stitches I find that happens when you just pick up the strand between two stitches on the row below, twist and knit it. However, as it turned out, this squeezing-together of stitches is what gives the 'acorns' some of their shape and is thus absolutely necessary at least in the acorns part of the pattern (not so much for yoke and waist increases, where I've gone back to my way of doing it).