Storm Sweater: a Flurry of Texture

This was supposed to be my brain-break sweater, but it broke my brain instead.

I started the Storm Sweater when I was still early in my second run at Dark Academia. I’m rarely monogamous with my knitting, and especially since Dark Academia was so daunting with its fingering weight and intricate colourwork, I wanted something different to spice things up.

With a few sweater quantities worth of gorgeous DK weight yarn that I was eager to use, I began whittling down my pattern library to find the perfect match. I knew I didn’t want plain stockinette to start with. I wanted something with visual interest, but no cables — so I wouldn’t have to fuss with a cable needle — and no colourwork, because Dark Academia had that covered in spades. Last, but most importantly, I wanted something in-the-round. After the lengthy battle with short rows that was the Camp Craft shawl, I was ready for a break from flipping my work back and forth.

From the outside, PetiteKnit’s Storm Sweater was a perfect palate cleanser. DK weight, monochrome, and textured with different combinations of knit and purl stitches in a sort of sampler motif.

I’ve never met a project that was simultaneously so simple, but so complex.

The yarn I chose to use was the neon-red merino yarn — a shade hilariously named ‘Punch a Fascist’ — that I picked up from Fibre Goddess at the Prairie Fibre Festival in Olds this past summer. PetiteKnit tends to lean more Scandi-issue neutral, but bold colour choices like this fire engine red really pop with the designs, and I’m seldom neutral on anything, anyway.

My first curveball came with the construction of the sweater. Instead of being fully in-the-round, it started with shaping the back panel flat, then picking up for each shoulder and shaping the neckline and armholes, connecting the front pieces, and then later — finally — joining in the round at the armpits. I’ve done this before with stockinette, but having the different stitch motifs really threw me for a loop. Especially when I had to reverse the patterns as I knit them flat. It made for a lot of little mistakes, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a crochet hook.

It was so much easier once I joined in the round and didn’t have to flip my work all over the place anymore. The different sections each presented their own sense of novelty. My favourite is the crosshatch diamond bit, the lines of purl bumps converging into satisfying diagonal shapes.

Considering the stitch patterns, the rows of garter separating each section, and the superwash merino it was knit with, my sweater was bound to expand greatly with blocking as the stitches relaxed. This is a common occurrence with the Storm Sweater (and with PetiteKnit patterns overall in my experience), where people tend to end up with a comically oversized garment.

Knowing this, I was very careful to lay out my finished sweater to my measurements, pinching and reshaping the stretched material accordingly so it wouldn’t turn into a dress for Slenderman. The finished product is still oversized, but it’s definitely cozy.

Finishing Storm and Dark Academia back to back like this really put my knitting skills to task, but I am so pleased with the result and proud of how far I’ve come.