Bright Orange Deschain

9/4 – This yarn was an adoption of sorts from my friend Carol of A Stitch in Time podcast. She’s shared that she’d tried using it in several projects and it never worked for her, and it also wasn’t a color she was fond of. I offered to take it off her hands and thus we enacted a little trade. I’m thrilled to have it! I love this orange!

It just so happened that I’d unexpectedly acquired a sleeveless black tank dress around the same time that the yarn arrived. It’s such a simple, classic dress so it will easily dress up or down, and I’m imagining it looking quite cute with cropped(ish) sweaters. This orange yarn is first up for a fun Halloween-ish pairing!

I cast on for Deschain last night and got through the first pattern repeat on the front. This sweater is designed for Aran weight, and it’s also designed to have 16″-22″ (??!!!) of positive ease. There is not way I want that much positive ease, so after swatching (roughly) I found that I was getting close enough gauge on US8s and I cast on for the smallest size, which is listed as 54 1/4″, which will give me a 8 1/4″ positive ease (though in all likelihood, it’ll be a bit more, as I tend to loosen up as I knit).

This is knit top down in pieces, front and back, and then seamed. I’m going to knit the front down as far as my desired armhole depth, and then knit the back to the same length, and then join and knit in the round an inch or so, go back and add whatever I’m going to do for the armholes/sleeves, and then finish the length with whatever yarn I have left. With just under 5 full skeins, I don’t anticipate it being super long, but I’m also not doing long sleeves, so hopefully it’ll work out. (Carol said the yarn is quite old, and I the colorway number is faded out on the only full, never-used skein, so I highly doubt I could get anymore yarn to go with it, thus I’m planning to make it work with what I have! Fingers crossed!) (Follow up to this – in looking on Carol’s project pages, I found one of her frogged projects that had the yarn colorway and lot number, so I’ve added that here.)

9/5 – Second pattern repeat finished on the front. It’s quite memorizable.

10/6 – Body is finished! I had to make some modifications to how I did the decorative hem, which I’ll elaborate on here when I have more time to spell them out.

10/10 – First sleeve is underway. I think I’ll have enough yarn to make the sleeves 3/4 length. Fingers crossed!

10/29 – Finished this the other day…

Worked sleeves concurrently on US7. Had a hiccup in that I picked up 4 fewer stitches on the 2nd than the 1st, so I had to rip back to before my last two decreases to have the same number. Finished both using the same decorative motif as the body used. Later realized that was not in the pattern, but I was happy with it so I left it as is.

Did the neckline as written in the pattern and really like it.

Gauge was an interesting issue throughout the sweater – top parts of the body knit flat are more open than the rest of the body worked in the round. Not a surprise, but could have been mitigated if I’d have purled with the next smaller size. Didn’t think of it. The sleeves were a tighter gauge than the body, which would have been the case even if I’d have used an 8; using a 7 was an interesting life choice…but it was fine. However, the second sleeve is about 1” tighter than the first, and the only thing I can attribute that to is that I used my longer Lykke US7 tips and a longer cable for the first and the shorter tips and a shorter cable for the second.

It blocked perfectly and I’m incredibly happy with how it turned out.

I only have about 50 grams left of the yarn I got from Carol. Really happy to have been able to get a full sweater from it!

I’ve added a modeled pic, but I hope to take some better ones on a less gloomy day!