Thursday, November 20, 2008

Knit Sweaters

I have recently been working on designing and knitting Fair Isle and Norwegian type sweaters. But since we live in Southern California, it's not cold enough most of the time to wear a traditional Norwegian type sweater with sport weight yarn, so I designed a few sweaters that are knit with Knit Picks Essential sock yarn. It's fingering weight yarn that is 75% superwash Merino wool/25% nylon. The colors I used are bare (undyed yarn) and Sarge. This yarn is heavenly to knit with. I used size 2 needles (2.75 mm) and got about 7.5 stitches per inch on this sweater. I call it Glacier Bay after the beautiful place in Alaska. I've designed a few sweaters and I'm currently working on one called Kenai Fjords, another gorgeous place in Alaska. Those names sound great.

These pictures show my handsome husband, David, wearing the sweater. It fits him perfectly, and he absolutely loves it. Anyone who doesn't like wool would love this yarn because it's very soft.

I also knit a few sweaters for our new dog, Oliver. He is a rescue dog who is 13 pounds. He's a poodle/terrier mix. He and our Rottweiler, Hansi, have become best friends. It's so cute to see our 100-pound dog play so gently with the little 13-pound guy.

This particular sweater is Patons Merino Classic wool yarn in Retro. I got the pattern from this website. This lady has designed some gorgeous dog sweaters. I highly recommend the patterns from this website.
So far I have made four sweaters for Oliver, but he was not very cooperative today with taking lots of pictures, so I will just show one sweater.