Stranded

The top-down raglan-y colorwork baby sweater is done...complete with EZ-style secret message hem. I think it should fit Mr. Colin James when he's about 1.

I never thought I'd say this, but yay for fair isle! I mean, this is no Alice Starmore, but it's my first. The stranding is reasonably even and aside from a few spotty spots on the yoke where I was trying to outthink the chart, I'm pleased with the design.

My photography assistant, whose cute toes poked their way into two of these pics--he actually took the photo with the turned-up hem--even said, "Wow, mom, that's cool."

As for the sweater's construction technique--I will definitely be making more top-down sweaters, but I'm not going to use Mary Rich Goodwin's book for more than inspiration...Her designs use only minimal shaping (there are short rows below the neck ribbing), but don't have some of the other attention to detail I've seen possible in top-down patterns. For instance, what about the underarm bunching? How about a neck that doesn't funnily funnel?

I downloaded Glampyre Knits' "One Skein Wonder" for myself and want to try a sweater pattern from either her online collection, her book Fitted Knits, or one of these designs (maybe Something Red? I'm a sucker for red).

On to other things...

Colorwork looks really cool from the underside.

Maybe that's why the designer of this sweater...Put the sleeves on inside-out.

Oh, yes.

I picked up this little beauty at our local Salvation Army which, aside from being the least-smelly thrift store in town, also carries all of the rejects, samples, and overstocks of a clothing brand called Mac & Jac. This sweater had a tag marked $89; the other sweater I got had a tag--from Nordstrom!--marked $119. I paid, for each...

wait for it...

FIVE DOLLARS.

It had a three-to-four-inch hole along the back bottom border, which I was able to kitchener closed using color-matched DMC embroidery floss, adding a few duplicate stitches so the pattern wasn't too off. It's a bit warbly--see above--but since the repaired area is on the back of a colorful sweater, I don't think anyone will notice but me. I wish I had a more dramatic before/after but I was so excited to fix it that I sort of forgot about the whole "for posterity" thing.

Because this was a sample sweater, it doesn't have the full garment care tag, but the yarn feels like a cotton/acrylic blend. It's soft, slightly fuzzy, and very warm.

The buttons were missing as well, and I replaced them with some quasi-amber brown plastic ones from JoAnn.

So--I don't think I'll be trying inside-out colorwork as a design feature any time soon, but to get a $90 sweater for $5 plus two skeins of embroidery floss and a couple of buttons...? Priceless.