A Sweater for another Season

I found a really nice top-down knitted sweater pattern on the Drops Design website. It is a 2-colour Brioche pattern. I am really loving Brioche knitting at the moment so thought it would be a great project to tackle! This would be my biggest Brioche project to date.

I decided I would not use off-the-shelf commercial yarns for it, though! No way, NOT when I have so much yarn and fleece in my stash!

I decided to do the contrast colour as a hand‐dyed, handspun merino and the main colour would be dyed to a suitable colour.

I used merino roving and dyed it in Magenta, Peacock Blue and Pistachio. I spun it up as singles, as I did not want any unnecessary colour blending and mixing from plying. There is a slight bit of mixing during the spinning but not as much as there would have been if I had plyed the wool. I spun it as a DK singles, ie, it is the same thickness as a DK.

The main colour was dyed in a very light wash of the Peacock Blue colour. I used a DK yarn from African Expressions that I had on a cone. I wound off what I thought was enough and dyed it. (PS. I had to dye an extra skein before I could finish the sleeves and I luckily managed to match it up perfectly!) To check whether the colours match, photograph the 2 balls in colour, and then convert that picture to grayscale. If they are identical in grayscale, they are as close as dammit in real colour!

I started knitting the sweater but had to do quite a bit of frogging before I got into the rhythm and settled down with the pattern.

I thoroughly enjoyed knitting it and finished the main knitting while travelling on the highways and byways of Limpopo province in February! Luckily there was air conditioning in the car so it was bearable to knit wool in the summer heat.

I did the finishing off and working away of ends once we were home again.

This sweater was knitted in the heat of the South African summer, in anticipation of the cold conditions in the USA in early March! Hence the title – A Sweater for another Season!