Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Weatherbury 1

There are some stories behind this sweater. I should start with the obvious: it’s a knock-off of Anthropologie’s weatherbury sweater for my little sister. It’s made from three or so skeins of Sierra Pacific Crafts’ “Accord,” a painfully, painfully cheap acrylic which isn’t too awful to handle once knitted up but actually started damaging my fingertips two-thirds of the way through. It was sort of fun to do the math and calculate the difference between the selling price of the original and the material costs of my knock-off: something like $116-$3= $113 difference. Only, I eyeballed the skein size instead of calculating yardage, so I have another three skeins of the stuff… well, accidents happen. The design across the bust is a slip-stitch pattern, not smocking; a clever deception that’s not obvious unless you’re looking it over in person. The rest is (obviously) alternating knit and purl rows. But on with the stories!


The first story has to do with moëbius strips. Yes, I mean plural. When I cast on first, it was at a friend’s house, in the dark, and there may or may not have been glow-in-the-dark paint involved. I knit about six inches without ever looking at my hands… and then straightened it out to find that it only had one edge. Uh-huh. So I unraveled and started over, this time after helping a friend piece together an afghan—and you can guess what happened then.

1 comment:

Honey said...

This is beautiful! Would you be willing to make the pattern available to others (namely me)?