TABC V: Revenge of the Sweater

When we pulled a bag of wool from the abandoned hoarder-bus on my in-law’s property, I never thought it would lead to finishing someone else’s long-neglected project (or five blog installments).

Turns out, the wool was only the beginning. At the bottom of the bag lay a pair of sleeves for an unfinished Nordic sweater, along with the Icelandic yarn to get the job done. As if that wasn’t cool enough, the sleeves fit me perfectly.

Having inherited this stash, I felt a certain responsibility to pick up where the original knitter left off. Given the yarn used, it was most likely a pattern by Elenka — a yarn brand that had been discontinued more than 30 years prior. Elenka produced pattern booklets, mostly of sweaters that matched the Icelandic origins of the wool itself. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible to get my hands on an Elenka pattern as they obviously hadn’t been digitized.

Instead, I took to Ravelry to find a suitable substitute. Luckily, I needed only to focus on the torso. I chose Frelsi by Meiju K-P, for its short colourwork section across the yoke, and the fact that the designer herself is Icelandic. The word “Frelsi” means “Freedom” in her language, and it was her first pattern release as a self-employed designer.

Colourwork still mildly terrifies me — especially if it includes a chart, which I always end up having to redo after the first row because I instinctively read it backwards (knitting charts are read from right to left). But with flipping the image and crossing out each row, I was able to make do in the end. I really appreciated the fact that each colourwork row for this sweater was a repeating pattern of 4-8 stitches, which naturally helped keep my tension even. If you aren’t careful with fair isle knitting and carry your contrasting colours across the back of too big a section, it messes up your tension between stitches and your knits will be left with this unflattering puckered look.

This project was also my first time trying to knit with yarn held double. As the name implies, it’s a knitting technique where you knit with two strands of yarn acting as one. With Elenka’s Icelandic yarn being extremely itchy to the touch, I wanted something to soften it up, and mohair was the way to go.

Mohair is a wispy, fluffy and extremely lightweight yarn made from the hair of the Angora goat. It’s most often used to blend with other fibres, and with it being so thin it can be held double with any yarn to add texture and softness. Although my husband, Mr. After This Row, kept exclaiming “Mole hair?!” whenever I brought it out.

I went to Stash, one of my favourite local yarn stores, after work one day with my sweater sleeves and a ball of Elenka yarn in tow to pick out the right shade of mohair. I would like to thank Amy for her help that evening, as I walked out that door with an armful of lovely mohair and the encouragement I needed.

When it came time to attach the sleeves, I at first tried to get fancy with a three-needle bind-off to graft the live stitches from the sleeves to that of the sweater. It was quite fiddly, so for the second sleeve I just bound off the end of the sleeve and the sleeve hole on the sweater and sewed them together with an invisible seam.

I don’t know if it’s because this yarn isn’t as new or Icelandic yarn in general is just “like that,” but I found the yarn would often slowly pull itself apart and break. Especially during the tubular bindoff that finished off the sweater, which made it endlessly frustrating, as the tubular bindoff is already a six-step process on its own without having to constantly contend with fragile fibre.

Somehow I didn’t notice this until the whole sweater was finished, but the armpits are waaaaay lower than they’re supposed to be. My pose in the photo is more of a necessity than anything else because I literally cannot move my arms. It’s weird, but hopefully fixable — I’m hoping it was just an issue with blocking because it fit just fine before I started the body.

All in all, this project was quite the journey. I hope that whoever made those sleeves is happy with what I’ve done with them.