Osborn Fiber Studio

It’s time for another finishing party! I’ve been on a real sweater-knitting streak, but the outdoors is no longer sweater-photography ready. With high temperatures below -20 C, and only a few hours of daylight, it is literally unsafe! With Jared out of town last week, I decided to stop putting it off, and took some pictures with just my tripod, a timer, and a blanket draped over the TV for a backdrop. I wasn’t too displeased with how the pictures came out, considering.

This is my Weekender/Metamorphic pattern, and its story starts last summer. I prepped two colours of a whole bunch of beautiful fibre, actually intending to make the Attune Shawl. But I spun and knit a sample, and realized right away that this was a sweater yarn. I finished prepping it anyway, and it became my big vacation spinning project for Tour de Fleece 2023.

I spun a good deal of it on supported spindles, and lots of it on then-new-to-me EEW6. It’s a testament to the woollen-ness of the prep that the skeins are functionally indistinguishable, though I never did measure their exact yardage or grist or anything to see if there were detectable differences. I’ve gotten really lazy about that this last year.

You can read the rest of my Tour de Fleece 2023 reflections at your leisure. I was quite happy with the finished woolen 3-ply yarn, and it got to sit in the stash for about a year. When I got back from our sabbatical this fall, I was ready to give it its moment.

Ever since I pivoted away from thinking of this as a shawl yarn, the sweater I had in mind was a mashup of the Weekender and Metamorphic sweater patterns by Andrea Mowry. I really liked the silhouette of the Weekender, with the drop shoulder and boat neck, but I of course wanted to be able to use both of these colourways together to make a sweater quantity, and I liked how the Metamorphic did that. Little did I know, that would be harder than I thought.

I decided to use the green for the ribbing and slip stitches, because the darker colour just looks better next to my face and grounds the whole look a bit better. One change I made right away was to make four slip stitch points around the sweater, like the Metamorphic rather than the Weekender, because that hides the spot where you change colours each round.

The biggest headache was dealing with the short rows at the top of the front and back. I didn’t even know they were there until I got to them, but they round the shoulders just a bit, which reduces the inevitable underarm bulk of a drop shoulder sweater. Doing these short rows while changing colours every row was not impossible, but it would have been almost impossible to write into a pattern. At least, it would have made the pattern much less tidy and clean than Andrea’s.

Just to shake things up, I switched to the grey for the MC on the sleeves. OK, the real reason was that I was a bit worried about running out of green; it would have been quite tight if I’d used green for the ribbing. And I made that ribbing very short, as that’s just how long the sleeves were when I got done with the decreases. Long sleeves with just a bit of ribbing makes this cozy sweater even slouchier, though I do like a nice deep wrist ribbing too.

Let’s talk for a second about the fabric.

Part of what makes this sweater pattern so great is that it has a wide, boxy shape, which looks especially flattering if the fabric has a bit of drape to it. Being a 100% woolen yarn, my handspun does not make a drapey fabric. Not one little bit. I was a bit worried, when it came off the needles, that I’d have to add some extra length to make up for any tendency to bunch, or sort of float and get caught up on my body rather than hanging off of it. But in the end, a severe blocking was all it needed. If I knit this pattern again, though – which is entirely possible, as this is exactly the sort of sweater I like to wear – I’ll choose fibers with more drape to them.

Otherwise, the fabric is quite nice. Having the purl side of stockinette stitch out reveals all the inconsistencies in my spinning. And this doesn’t bother me at all. It is consistently inconsistent, and gives the fabric lots of character.

The yarn is definitely soft enough – it’s 1/6th qiviut by weight. The grey is 5/6th Suffolk, a down wool, and the green is 5/6th wool pool roving from Custom Woolen mills. The Suffolk is soft enough; the wool pool wool is not really. I didn’t want to add more qiviut for colour reasons. But 1/6th isn’t really enough to make the fabric feel very soft. It’s perfectly fine for me, but to get these particular wool blends into the realm of what most people would call next-to-skin softness, I’d have wanted to add more like 1/4 qiviut. For me, I’m quite happy with what I got.

As I said, this drop-shoulder wide-body look is my go-to look right now. I have a sweater quantity queued up for my next big spin, a longwool this time that will drape very differently. I might spin it with this sweater as a general target.

I surely do love green. And it’s gratifying when I succeed in making the object I was envisioning before the yarn was spun. I don’t judge myself at all if I spin a yarn with a project in mind, and the yarn doesn’t end up being right for that. But sometimes it’s just right, and there’s experience in that event, not just luck!

I hope your December is off to a good start! I have one more finished sweater to show you that I photographed this day; lets see if I can get that post written this week…