Having finished two of the most complex sweaters I’ve ever made back-to-back, I feel like I could fight a god and win.
I’ll be looking at both vastly-different garments on my blog, starting with the colourwork masterpiece that is Dark Academia by Sharon Hartley. Stranded colourwork sweaters and I had yet to truly get along until now. Between the balancing act of managing floats — too short, and the fabric will be too tight; too loose, and it’ll pucker — following complex charts, and the fact that the designs are written for much longer torsos than mine, made me believe for a long time that I was not destined for such beauty as a fair isle sweater.
Until I learned how to make the pattern fit me, not the other way around.
“Dark Academia” is an aesthetic descriptor, inspired by gothic architecture, classic literature, and old-world European university culture. The sweater boasts a cathedral/stained-glass window motif, which I leaned into with my colour choices. My contrast colour was an indie-dyed variegated yarn — Creation Miss Couture’s Autumn Rhapsody, which melts between shades of green, red, and yellow — and a commercial yarn, Scheepjes Metropolis in the Hamburg colourway for the main colour. Because it wasn’t enough to challenge myself to knit stranded colourwork, I had to do it in black.
It took nine months to complete this beast, including starting over once and an encounter with a rogue Roomba. I was 40 rows deep into the first chart when I dropped several stitches down several rows. I tried in vain to fix it, but it was genuinely easier to rip it all out and start from scratch than to try and ladder up the rogue stitches without accidentally picking up the wrong strand.
Having to start over was a blessing in disguise, however, because I was able to really hone in and take my time with it (after putting the project in ‘time out’ until I wasn’t mad at it anymore). I made a lot of little adjustments to the design, starting with the neckline. Instead of a flat collar, I decided to turn it into a double-brim — which helped provide extra structure and a great place to hide elastic reinforcement.
Stitch Fiddle is now my go-to tool for knitting complex designs. The visual, virtual progress tracker made a world of difference. Doubly so when I started using an iPad as a second screen exclusively for my charts, so I didn’t have to try and divide my laptop screen in half or flip between windows. I could while away hours of knitting with a Twitch stream or YouTube video to entertain me, more comfortable than ever before.
I became well-acquainted with the notion of a mid-project block. Soaking and pinning down my work to even out tension and check on progress before continuing to knit, especially between transitions. Likewise, I also used lifelines religiously, inserting a length of embroidery thread through my stitches on strategic rows, saving me from having to undo everything again if I made another catastrophic error.
My previous attempts at fair isle sweaters were not successful due in large part to the fact that the yoke — shaping done around the chest, back, and shoulders to make space for the arms — is often too long. If I follow the pattern as written, my armholes would be halfway to my bellybutton.
It’s not an uncommon problem. There are lots of solutions, like eliminating rows from the colourwork chart to cut the design short, but that’s best-suited for designs with a small section of colourwork. Since Dark Academia was all-over, I couldn’t easily omit rows from the yoke without it looking obvious. Instead, I split for the sleeves about 20 rows early. The following image shows where the sleeves would have fallen if I had followed the pattern verbatim. As you can see, it extends way past my entire chest.
This meant that my sleeves would be different, incorporating more of the chart for the chest than as written. Stitch Fiddle was extremely useful for helping me keep track of my progress through the charts, but especially here. I transposed the remaining rows onto the sleeve chart, making the transition seamless.
The small circumference of the sleeves presented some new challenges. People often find that they knit even tighter on colourwork sleeves, so I was advised to go at least one needle size up. This made a huge difference for my tension, as I didn’t encounter any issues with tightness, nor did it change the design drastically compared to the body. Everything still lined up the way it should.
I also learned that my brain really likes colourwork sleeves. It was so rewarding to have only four repeats of the chart to do each round, especially after the enormity of the body. I breezed through the first sleeve in just three days. It was a very brief trip to Sleeve Island this holiday season!
I feel extremely proud of myself for finishing this sweater, and to finally have confidence in my fair isle skills.
Absolutely beautiful. Great yarn choices.