Caryn Vainio — 26 October 2024
<aside> 🧶 The goal was to create a very squishy sweater that would be easy to roughly fit and test as I knit it, with simple shaping, and that would be easy to knit on auto-pilot while still having some kind of visual interest to the pattern (and not drive me crazy just being ribbed or stockinette).
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The sweater actually started a couple of years ago and got set aside when I took a big break from doing any textile work.
I needed a sweater for cold weather that was neutral in color — ideally gray, something that would slot in well with the rest of my cool weather wardrobe. I wanted something I knew would look great with my favorite plaid A-line skirts that I love wearing. I knew I wanted it to be fitted, and I knew that yoke sweaters tend to flatter me and be a pretty easy knit. I knew I wanted it to have a ribbed motif, but I thought that by adding a cable to the rib sparingly it would add interest to the sweater and the knitting process.
I knew I wanted this sweater to be squishy with lots of loft in the yarn. To get that quality, I knew I would prep and spin the fibers to maximize that quality. Choosing to card the fibers would accomplish a couple of things: it would prep the fibers for that loft, and it would blend the wool and the alpaca at the same time.
I chose to spin the fibers with a long draw double draft on my Peruvian pushkas since this would also maximize the loft of the final yarn — Peruvian pushkas are very lightweight drop spindles and their weight helps produce a lofty yarn. I chose to create a 2-ply yarn and plied on my Peruvian chaj-chaj spindle.
I normally start with a sketch for my sweater designs, which I’d show here, but I didn’t sketch this one since it was a very simple design and very similar to one I’d already knit.
Corriedale is a favorite fiber to work with, and I had sought out a beautiful award-winning Corriedale fleece from a local farm. I bought the fleece at the Monroe fiber market at the yearly festival, and the fleece was gray and came from a sheep named Clancy. I knew I wanted sheep wool because I needed loft and softness, so a short-to-medium staple length fiber with good crimp would be at least 60% of the fiber base for the yarn. The fleece was clean but otherwise unprepped.
Clancy’s fiber is so wonderful that I contacted the shepherd and bought a second fleece of his for even more projects!
To darken the fleece, add further softness and warmth, and of course make it even more personal, I added black alpaca from my boy Benz. Benz would pass away in September 2024 at the ripe old age of 18 while I was working on the sweater, which makes the sweater a wonderful sentimental way to remember the last of our first herd of alpacas and our sweetest boy in the herd.
I chose a 2-ply yarn construction because I was going for loft and warmth as opposed to strength and drape. Most of my spinning these days is done on spindles as opposed to a spinning wheel, and I was planning on doing that here as well. Peruvian pushkas are extremely lightweight spindles that lend themselves wonderfully to a long draw double draft, so that’s what I chose to spin the project on, using a carded prep of rolags that were a 60% Corriedale and 40% alpaca blend. This method of spinning goes really fast and is very portable, which was another bonus for this sweater project.
Our boy Benz, who contributed the black alpaca fleece in this project. He passed away in September 2024, a month before the sweater was finished, so the sweater is a lovely way to remember him.