Sherlock Gets a Sweater

It turned cold here today, and the weatherman predicted it would be in the 30's last night. Poor little Sherlock looked at me with his big brown eyes and I swear asked me for a sweater.

So I scrounged up some red Rowan Chunky Tweed and some black Lamb's Pride and, partially guided by the Dogs in Knits book, made him a Sherlock coat.

It fits well, although it could have been made longer. He seems to like it as far as I can tell-- he isn't trying to get it off! Ginger is very curious about this. I think she's a little jealous.

I'm pretty tired, maybe I'll add more to this tomorrow morning. I wasn't thrilled with the pattern, it was very hard to understand.

Time for a martini, methinks!

update:

Caroline has sharp eyes for detail! I wrote this entry last night, on the 27th, but since I had already written an entry for the 27th I changed the date to the 28th, so that it won't disappear from the main page for a couple of days.

Anyway, about the dog sweater pattern. I used the "Native American-Inspired Blanket Sweater" pattern from the Dogs In Knits book by Judith L. Swartz (no relation to Felina). It calls for Manos del Uruguay, at 4 stitches per inch, but I used Rowan Chunky Tweed at 3 stitches per inch and eyeballed the stitch count. It also has an intarsia pattern, but we didn't want that. What we did like was the applied I-cord borders.

The pattern was fine until the instructions for finishing. The use of such terms as "lower edge of back", "side edges of back", etc were ambiguous. Did she mean as the sweater sat on the dog, or as the illustration showed it, or what? Every time I thought I understood what she meant, the directions contradicted me. You'd think it was straightforward, maybe it was just me.

Also, the instructions had you knit two inches of I-cord before starting to attach it to the sweater, which ultimately left you with four 2-inch sections of I-cord for-- what? It looked wrong, had no purpose, and so I omitted it and just sewed the ends of the finished I-cord together.

Lastly, attaching a highly contrasting color of I-cord to the body of a sweater will not be pretty-- unless!! Unless you use Joyce Williams' great technique as described in Sweaters From Camp: Knit two stitches (of your 3-stitch I-cord), slip the 3rd, YO, Knit the picked-up stitch from the body of the sweater, then slip the prior two stitches over. The YO hides the body color glitch. I couldn't get the books' I-cord instructions to work for me, though I tried.

As far as the shape of the sweater, it's pretty good. However, for the next one I will just make a diamond-shaped panel for the chest, and make the underneath strip much narrower. Instead of attaching the underpanel directly to the upper one after the opening for the leg, I attached another I-cord strip that jumped the gap so that Sherlock has plenty of movement ability. He can still run, jump, dance and play as if he were only wearing only his own skin.

So I finished something else. Why am I so cranky about it? Is it because of the instructions, or because I killed my wrists on the chunky yarn and big needles? Next dog sweater will be soft, very soft. And on size 6 or smaller needles!

Posted by Sheila at October 28, 2004 06:15 PM Posted to Knitting | TrackBack