Knitting: Bow Jumper

Back in January last year, I was whiling away some time in Smiths while I was waiting to catch a train when a little photo on the cover of Knitting magazine (issue 124) caught my eye. It was of a jumper with a colourwork bow on the front, which I thought was just the right level to satisfy my general love of bows, without being twee enough to take it to the point where my sister and mum tell me to step away and leave it alone (which is not an infrequent occurrence!). I bought the magazine, added the jumper to my never-ending list of future knitting projects and little over a year later, here it is!

The jumper is knit flat, and other than the rib at the waistband, wrists and neck, is just all stocking stitch with the bow knitted using intarsia, so it was relatively speedy to knit and was good for evenings in front of the TV when you need something that doesn't require too much concentration. I started it towards the end of October after I finished my polka dot cushion cover, got the back finished fairly quickly, then put the whole thing on hold while I was working on Christmas presents and finished the rest in the first six weeks of this year. That's fairly speedy for me, because I'm not the world's best or quickest knitter. 

However, it does mean that once again I've managed to finish a knitting project just as the season when I want to wear it is coming to an end! Never mind, I've enjoyed wearing it already, spring is only just starting to show its face so I'm sure I'll be wearing it again before the weather warms up more, and it'll be ready and waiting for me next winter. Maybe this year I should try to start winter knits in the middle of summer - but that never seems that appealing! I'm not the only one who suffers from this problem am I?

The jumper is designed to be worn with a bit of positive ease, but I thought I'd prefer a slightly more fitted style so, as my measurements fell between two sizes, I decided to go with the smaller size and I think that worked out fairly well. There's a bit of excess around the waist section, but it's similar to the fit on the model in the magazine so I think that's just the way it's meant to be. At least that's what I'm telling myself, because I'm not confident enough with knitting to start messing around with the shaping of patterns too much. 

I enjoyed knitting the bow section - I really love watching how the pattern gradually emerges as you knit each row. That's not weird is it?! The edges of the different coloured sections aren't entirely faultless, and I did end up with a couple of small holes at the start of the blue sections, but some strategic weaving in of ends soon sorted that out. 

The yarn I used is Hayfield Aran with Wool in shades softmint (741) and navy (995). I saw the navy in a local knitting shop and it felt nice and soft, but was the only shade they had in stock so I switched to an online search. I thought the softmint would be a good match, and I am really happy with how the colours look together, but the softmint doesn't feel quite as nice as the navy. It's not a massive difference, and it's still fine to wear, but it is definitely noticeable. It's interesting how different dyes can have that effect on the same wool. 

Overall, I'm happy with the end result. I do wish I'd managed to get it finished a bit sooner to give me more time to enjoy it this winter, but better late than never! I've already started my next knitting adventure - my first foray into the world of handmade socks. Any tips for me?

Mastering the art of intarsia: polka dot knitted cushion

Yay, it's the weekend! How's your week been? I've had a bit of an odd one involving masses of work, my washing machine nearly catching fire and getting part of my sewing machine needle stuck in my finger (still don't know quite how that happened, as you can imagine it was pretty painful at the time but nothing too serious and thankfully my machine, needles and hands have been getting on again nicely since then!), so I'm glad it's time for a couple of days off. This will probably be a fairly quick post, but I wanted to share my latest knitting project with you.

One of my aims for this year was to try out some sort of colour work in knitting. I've got a couple of Fair Isle and intarsia cardigan and jumper patterns that I want to knit, but I thought I'd start with something a bit more low key so I gave this cushion cover pattern a try. Knitting a cushion cover might seem like a lot of work when I could sew one in next to no time, but I thought it would be a good practice project because I wouldn't mind if the results were less than perfect, whereas if I made a slightly dodgy jumper or cardigan, I probably wouldn't wear it much so all the work would go to waste.

For anyone who isn't familiar with it, intarsia involves knitting one colour at a time, with separate mini balls of wool for each individual patch of colour, which are then twisted around each other to prevent holes where the colours join. I'm probably not explaining it very well, and it all sounded a bit scary to me before I tried it, but it's actually fairly easy to get used to. I'm glad I did use this as a practice project though, because you can definitely see my technique getting better as I went through the cushion. The spot above is one of the later ones that I knitted, and it's not perfect still as the tension's a bit off on the left-hand side, but it's not too bad and definitely better than the earlier spots.

If you're thinking of giving intarsia a go, I'd definitely recommend getting some bobbins for winding the individual yarn colours around (I used these). I started off just winding little "butterflies" of yarn but I found that they just got into a tangled mess. There was still a bit of tangling when I used the bobbins, but much less, and it was much easier to sort out.

The pattern is from a random knitting magazine I got a while ago that's just full of cushion patterns - it was part of one of those magazine series where the first one is 99p and you get loads of free stuff and then the others are all massively more expensive. This was the first one in the series and for 99p it was a pretty good deal!

It's a straightforward pattern - just one long rectangle in stocking stitch with the intarsia polka dots in the middle and 3 buttonholes at one end, then when you've finished knitting you just fold the rectangle back on itself and sew up the sides to make an envelope, then add the buttons. Simple!

So there we go, that's my cushion. It's by no means perfect, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It's in its new home next to the rainbow crochet cushion I made last year, so I have a chair full of colourful yarny fun! I'm now getting started on one of my intarsia jumper patterns - hopefully I'll manage to get it finished in time to get a bit of wear out of it this winter. Has anyone else got any good winter knitting projects on the go?