Rowan Magazine #34 – Parka and Reveal

Top of sweater in progress

Sweater knit in one piece

Sweater taking shape

Sweater completed

Emma wearing Reveal

Parka

My completed sweater

I must like this edition of the Rowan knitting magazine because I knitted  two more of the designs featured in it.

Reveal was designed by Leah Sutton and it called for Cork. Again I used a substituition – baby chunky alpaca and as always changed needle size to get the gauge. The picture I took of Emma wearing it was in a New York hotel when I visited and the lighting was not so good. I made it in 2006,  for my daughter Emma who is a grad student at NYU. The other pictures show the progression to this sweater. It was all knit in one piece (i think) – been a long time ago. The instructions was quite a challenge to understand but I knit it to the best of my ability!

Parka was another design by Kim Hargreaves using Polar yarn but I substituted it with Rowan Tweed chunky. My LYS Jimmybeanswool had a sale on rowan yarn at that time. I had to change needle sizes to get the  same gauge as the polar but of course polar is a much softer yarn. I did not care about the softness or lack there of because I wanted to knit this pattern so badly! It had several pockets and I wanted to see if I could challenge myself to knit it. As you can see from the picture, I did finish it, gold buttons and all. Don’t you hate that model? All long and lean! Well, with me being short waisted and chunky, I had to shorten the length of the waist. I think I did.

I love knitting all these sweaters and sometimes it is quite a challenge to decipher the instructions in English knitting magazines, especially the instructions to Reveal.

Rowan magazine # 34 – Bet by Kim Hargreaves

Back of Sweater

Bobbins hanging

Picture of model plus my project.

Picture of model plus my project.

My goal this year is to pick up my unfinished projects and work on them. This particular project is from Rowan magazine # 34 called Bet designed by Kim Hargreaves. I bought the yarn a few years ago and started on the back piece…and there it remained on my needles in a plastic bag. I took it with me to Japan when we moved there in October 2007. Never picked it up.  It got shipped back to my house this past Mar (2009) when we relocated back to the USA  and about three weeks ago I decided to work on it. I promised my daughter that it was a birthday present, then it was a christmas present, then her birthday…well, you get my meaning.

The yarn is Rowan tweed 4 ply, very thin and the pattern is circles worked in intarsia. Daughter #1 absolutely loves this pattern and now that i have restarted it, I am enjoying it.

I finished the back and the left front. I am enjoying it. I try to knit the ends in as much as I can but I still have a lot of weaving to do and I try to do it once I finish one pattern repeat.

Nov 3rd 2008

I got feedbacks and comments from my friends that our website looks good. It took me a couple of days to code the website but several days to debug it. Different browsers displays differently. Explorer is more finnicky and the codes have to be just so. Mozilla fox tend to do what you want even if you miss a few closing brackets.

So, just a recap, our site is : www.2knitwits.com