Saturday 10 October 2020

AbbyHill Pullover

Hiya, sorry for the radio silence. I recorded another episode of my podcast (three more, now) and I wanted to do a blogpost for my notes and I also wanted to write a post about my Abbyhill pullover but I was going to wait until the pattern was launched so I could put in the appropriate links... And here we sit (I'm sitting, I presume you are too) over a month later. I also really hurt my wrist for the second time in as many months only this time I really did a number on it and, honestly, it was bad enough that I had to consider I might not have been able to knit again. Fortunately it looks like it will heal all the way, or at least as much as I normally consider "fully healed" but I'm still having to take things slower and not do things that hurt my wrist. Typing hurts my wrist. yay?

I cast on my test knit of the Abbyhill Pullover by Ysolda Teague on 16 July and finished it on 16 August which includes waiting for the pattern to be updated after an error was found across the sizes while Ms Teague was on holiday and we had to wait for her to return to fix it. Three things: 1) errors like this one are absolutely a part of test knitting and 2) I'm glad she didn't take the time to fix it while on her holiday. Even if it "only took a few hours", if you start doing work stuff for this, you'll start doing work stuff for that, and you won't get a proper rest. I very much want to be part of a culture that thinks being on holiday means not doing any work stuff and that everyone should take regular holiday. And finally 3), that means I actually knit an entire sportweight pullover in three weeks. Hot diggity.

I knit mine in the sadly discontinued Cochrane yarn from Ripples Crafts Yarns in the colour "Berry Picking". Cochrane was custom-spun for the 10th anniversary of Ripples Crafts yarn, a 50/50 blend of Scottish BFL and Bowmont and it was a really special yarn. I bought two skeins, one Berry Picking and one Moonlight, a silver with the slightest blush of purple, to knit the Nissolia Shawl by Martina Behm from the Arnall-Culliford Knitwear "Something New to Learn About Lace" collection. Only, because Cochrane is a "heavy fingering", which is to say a sportweight, that wasn't quite enough yarn. So I ordered a second skein of the purple to finish the shawl. And the yarn was lovely. And the shawl is beautiful. But it was also, because it was a plumper yarn, bigger than the original, in a way that makes it somewhat impractical to wear.

Not a problem, I thought, I love this yarn so much that I will just buy more to make it a Sweater Quantity. But it was expensive luxury yarn and I didn't have a sweater in mind for the SQ so I just....periodically bought more. Which meant I had a collection of yarn that was all dyed the same way, but some of which came out noticeably different. Helen offered to let me trade it back for a batch all done at the same time but every time we could have been in the same place something came up and I couldn't make it. And now I finally had a pattern in mind, the yarn had a similar compisition and the same meterage, and I had several dye lots to juggle.

Abbyhill is knit bottom up in the round to the arm holes, then the sleeves are knit cuff up, and the whole thing is knit together in an asymetrical yoke pattern that gives it a more set-in-sleeve fit. I took my darkest two skeins to start the ribbing, one for the body and one split for the sleeves, then added in the next two darkest in helical stripes, which got me up to the yoke striping skeins 3 and 4 and then half of skein 5 and whereas 1-4 were different only in how much of each skein was given to the darkest purple splodges vs the medium purple splodges. The 5th skein, and the three in my shawl, was a lot more pink and, really, I should have been spiraling that one with the darkest purple to mix it all together but, fortunately, because the top of the yoke is somewhat horizontal the light hits it completely different from the verticle body and it's really not noticeable.

I love my Cochrane AbbyHill. Because Scotland had an absolutely terrible summer (gorgeous spring, awful summer), I've been wearing it almost every day since I finished, if only on the morning school run when it was still cool and misty. It's my first slightly cropped, oversized knit and I can see why this style is so popular, it is very wearable. I knit mine entirely as written, in a size that gave me 7" of positive ease from my upper bust, which was only 2" of positive ease from my full bust. It may not be politic to admit it, but I also like the idea of knitting garments where I'm not paying twice as much and taking twice as long to knit the same pullover as "average" size people, because we might be knitting the same size.

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