A Honey Folk Tale

I think I just made the most autumnal sweater of all time (just in time for autumn to end).

I had been browsing Ravelry on the way to Knit City Calgary this past summer. I wanted to pick a pattern for which to buy yarn at the event. Ravelry is the main online database for knitting patterns, and I use its Advanced Search feature almost exclusively when I’m looking for my next project.

I wanted to make a pullover sweater in a single colour, with yarn no thinner than DK weight, raglan shaping, and knit top-down in-the-round. I plugged my parameters into the filters and scrolled along. I found myself drawn to patterns with textured stitches, particularly honeycomb motifs.

That’s when I saw Annie Lupton’s Honey Folk pattern, a beautiful design that featured right and left-twist stitches forming hexagons along the front, back, and sleeves, with stockinette separating the sections.

It was perfect. I wanted something that would be less monotonous than plain stockinette, but that wasn’t going to completely break my brain like the Jenny Sweater I made last year.

With the perfect pattern in mind, I sought out the perfect yarn to go with it. I opted for a rust or burnt-orange colour. Something I didn’t have already in my knitwear collection, despite being among my favourite colours right now (after red, of course).

Fortunately, rust was a super popular yarn colour among the vendors at Knit City as well! I was truly spoiled for choice, and after pacing the booths for a while, I chose a delightful tweed yarn from Bramble Ridge — a yarn dyer based in Mission, BC. Her “Redwood” colourway was the perfect cozy vibe I was looking for.

The nature of hand-dyed yarn is that it’s unpredictable, and each yarn can vary slightly between dyes. As such, I couldn’t tell that half of my yarns were ever-so-slightly different until I got home. Even so, I can only tell in certain lighting and scrutiny, so I got over it pretty quickly.

The honeycomb design was written in a series of charts for each section. Knitting charts are grid patterns that visually demonstrate the stitches or colourwork needed for each row of a project, rather than written instructions.

At first, I printed out the charts and crossed off each row as I finished to keep track of my place. This proved ineffective when I got past the raglan increases and started the body, which would repeat the chart over and over. I tried using pencil on the charts and erasing my marks to start over, but that wasn’t helpful. A pencil line would always be a little visible regardless of how hard I took the eraser to it.

Instead, I pivoted to online tools. Stitch Fiddle is a free chart-maker for all kinds of crafts. I transposed the charts into the program and used the built-in progress tracker to great advantage. I would have two windows open side-by-side on my laptop screen, with the chart on one side, and entertainment on the other.

For a long time, I would work exclusively on the body of a sweater before I would tackle the sleeves. I was a regular visitor to Sleeve Island. Lately, however, I have been using sleeve-knitting as a brain-break from knitting the body. This little shakeup of my routine also lent some novelty, making my progress feel more substantial even though I was knitting the same amount — just in a different order.

I am so happy with how the finished sweater looks, and am sure to have it in regular rotation for many years to come.