Osborn Fiber Studio

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! I hope you’ve had a splendid celebration. Don’t forget that it lasts twelve days! I refuse to take my tree down before Epiphany!

I have one more finishing party left for 2024. I’ve been putting off taking pictures of this one, because winter (read: indoor) sweater pictures never turn out particularly nice. I’d keep putting the sweater on with my outfit, then avoiding setting up the tripod to take pictures. Today, though, after a super-chill Christmas Day and a self-indulgent, lazy Boxing Day, I’m well-rested and raring to take on the new year. So here I am, tidying up a literal loose end.

This pattern is the Jethro Cardigan by Tanis Lavalee. It’s been an enormously popular pattern this year, what with the continued resurgence of crochet. It’s a brilliantly simple pattern, making use of the humble granny square and drop-shoulder construction. I saw a ton of these when I met up with Rachel at Knit City this summer, which finally spurred me on to start my own. But the story of my particular Jethro goes back much further than that.

This is my Skep blanket, which I finished this past spring. It was a culmination of a process of dyeing and combo-spinning that took from January 2023. As epic as this project was, I had a ton of leftovers afterwards from all these tiny skeins. About 8 oz, in fact! This was the pool I drew from to make my scraptastic Jethro.

As I crocheted these squares over the course of a few weeks, they became a log of all my handspinning history. 8 oz was plenty, but I found myself padding out that collection with other handspun scraps I had kept. There’s a little bit of my first handspun sweater in here. A little bit of a skein I spun in 2020 while visiting Rachel for the first time, a leftover battling from her earliest Patreon reward tiers. Some bits of 51 yarns. But mostly, it was Dyeapalooza.

I had the squares done, but what about a Main Colour? I seriously considered purchasing while at Knit City, but I do (shocker) have a lot of undyed fiber at home. And given the contruction of these Dyeapalooza samples – a textured DK-weight 2-ply – it would be a quick spin.

I ended up using fiber with a quite different personal association. About a year and a half ago, my friend Brenda passed away in a freak fishing accident. She was an incredible knitter, seamstress, beader, etc., and was just starting to get into spinning. A year on, her daughter sold me all her spinning supplies. The collection included an interesting assembly of fibers. I took a selection of these and carded them into the above fluffy batts. 18 oz total, they’re about equal amounts Clun Forest, Romney, Merino, and Alpaca – an interesting blend, to say the least. The alpaca is half white, half a nice fawn brown, from which it gets its gentle oatmeal-ish heathering.

As expected, the yarn spun up super-quick. I did make a nice little sample skein, complete with swatch, but then I just spun it up fairly inattentively on my e-spinner, like I’d spun my combo spins. I let in texture and enjoyed the woolen-ness of it all. I ended up with about 800 yards of heavy DK / light worsted.

I whipped up the sweater super-fast. Let me tell you all about it.

The crocheted panel is constructed using the continuous join as you go method. This is super entertaining. I laid out my squares on the floor in a 4×9 rectangle, making the left- and right-most two columns from my favourite squares since they’d be on the fronts. I then crocheted it all together in about 36 hours, because it was absolutely addictive watching it come together!

Adding sleeves, ribbed hem, and ribbed collar are super-simple, and took me another week or so.

When I first started crocheting the squares, I wasn’t sure I’d be game for making all five rounds different colours on every square. I did make a couple that were all one colour. But after a few, I got into a rhythm of catching ends in the crochet as I went, so there was precious little sewing in ends at the finish. And it was too fun trying to find the right amounts of each little wad of leftovers to complete different sized rounds. A constant game of yarn chicken that shouldn’t have been fun, but it totally was.

A granny square sweater has a different feel in the wearing than a knitted one. It’s heavier – crochet is always denser – but full of holes. With long sleeves underneath, it’s plenty warm. The drop-shoulder shape just sits on the shoulders in a way that feels secure and cozy. It is exactly like wearing a blanket; I completely forget it’s on.

My main colour is quite woolen, and has started to pill already. I’m no good at pill maintenance, so it’ll look homely until I get my act together in that department. Somehow, that fits with the general aesthetic of being earthy and warm, and generally looking as if I’ve always had it. That’s what it feels like – the sweater that I’ve secretly always had, it just didn’t have physical form yet.

It’s time to start gathering my thoughts for an end-of-year series of blog posts, a project I always enjoy. Spoiler: I made a lot of sweaters this year! And I spun a ton. This sweater in particular is the culmination of a lot of learning. And yet, like a good sweater, it disappears cozily into my life. So thank you for reading its moment in the sun.