WIP Wednesday - for Chris

Good morning everyone! Thanks so much for all the support and enthusiasm you've been showing with this weeks pattern sale! Who doesn't love a sale right? The shawl that was pictured in Monday's post is already being test knit and I hope to have the pattern ready to roll out next month. So glad you like it!

So, this week seems to be the week I cast on for a new project every night... I started a pair of socks on Monday night and then a sweater last night and am seriously considering starting another wee sweater tonight because honestly, Rowan is growing just way too fast and I have a few skeins of Green Label Tartan lingering that would make an awesome little hoodie. So... yup, I've decided, another new sweater will be cast on before the day is done. It's a good week for starting fresh!

I haven't knit a new sweater for Chris in ages. And that's a real shame because he is the best person to knit for. He wears his knit items with pride extremely regularly. He is more than knit-worthy. He's still rockin' a hideous (but sweet in it's naivety) sweater that I knit for him back when we were dating. It's huge and made out of acrylic yarn, but it has hearts on the sleeves and he likes it. I've been wearing my Reverb a lot lately, it's shocking how that golden Hayloft colourway goes with everything (who knew?) and every single time I throw it on Chris comments on how much he likes it. Last night, I'm in my Reverb, thrown on over jeans and a crazy pink plaid shirt and Chris says: "You look great tonight Tan." And then I realized, it's the sweater! Because let's be honest, I did not look great. He's obsessed with Reverb. So I asked if he would wear a Reverb of his own and he very enthusiastically gave me a "hell yeah!" So, there ya go, how could I say no? I dug through the stash, because I was pretty sure that I had a sweaters quantity of this really awesome rustic wooly wool that would be perfect for his sweater. I found the yarn, a few skeins had already been balled up and ready to go, and cast on immediately! I will be making a few mods to account for gauge, but I'll fill you in on those details when I figure them out myself. The yarn is from my favourite Nova Scotia sheep farm Lismore Sheep Farm. 

Ok, so then there is this pair of socks. Knit in the Burberry colourway of Turtlepurl striped turtle toes yarn. I'm knitting them bottom up since the yarn comes in two matching skeins so I'll knit each skein until I run out of yarn maximizing each and every yard. I bought this colourway with Chris in mind, thinking that he would love some classy Burberry inspired socks, but he's not showing me the love that I expected him to for this project... so they may end up going to someone else. I'm loving them however, hand dyed, self-striping yarns blow my mind. So beautiful, so labour intensive, I couldn't do it. 

And to end off this morning's post. Here is a picture of two skeins of Cosmic Blue Label Frost that I snapped yesterday afternoon. I was packing up orders and shipping them out, I had a pile of yarn on my desk and these two skeins were glowing in the afternoon sun. They looked angelic! This photo doesn't really capture the moment as well as I had hoped, but trust me, Frost in Cosmic Blue Label is amazing. 

That's it for me, happy hump day! What have you cast on this week? 

Brownstone Cardigan

Chris loves his Brownstone Pullover so much, that he decided to knit himself another one, this time with a few simple mods to turn it into the perfect, scholarly cardigan. He prefers wooden toggles to regular buttons, and I can't say that I blame him, they look perfect on this sweater. The yarn is the very sheepy and wooly Lismore Sheep Farm yarn that we picked up while at our cottage out East this summer. This is Chris' second favorite yarn in the world (second only to TFA of course!) it's definitely on the rustic side, probably too itchy for most, but Chris doesn't mind it at all.

Chris used to claim that he wasn't a cardigan person, but clearly this sweater proves him wrong. I think its the elbow patches that make him love it so much. They are "vintage" brown suede elbow patches that my mom has been hoarding away since the 70's! 

Chris hates modeling, he's much more comfortable with a prop, so we took a bunch of photo's of him with our most photogenic family member.

Possibly the best part? The night after Chris cast off he settled into the sofa for a casual night of tv, and within 10 minutes of sitting there he became antsy and wanted something new to cast on for! He's a real knitter!

We wish we had a farm

Around my cottage in Nova Scotia, farms are abundant. The properties often have several old, weathered barns and a beautiful old farm house. They are perched on top of rolling hills overlooking the ocean, with big green fields with cows or sheep grazing. Right across the street from my cousin's cottage was a pasture that they were calling the cow "maternity ward". It is where the farmer was grazing all of his pregnant or recently birthed cattle. It was adorable! A lovely pasture with tons of the cutest baby cows you've ever seen running around, following their mothers. Chris and I stopped to just look at them several times, baby cows are so sweet. 

And there are sheep too! We made our annual pilgrimage to the Lismore Sheep Farm again this year. There were baby sheep, and even baby Highland Cattle there this year. I had a chance to chat with the very friendly owner of the farm and to see his workshop where he makes the most beautiful wooden needles, the River John Needle Company. Chris and I each bought a sweaters worth of yarn. Last years haul became this and this. Chris has already started turning his beautiful light grey yarn into another Brownstone sweater, this time with a few mods to turn it into a cardigan. You can see in the corner of the shot below a darker blue/grey ball of yarn, that's the colourway I picked up. It's a stunning, blue/green/grey yarn, it reminds me a bit of Stormy in the way it can look different depending on the light. 

My mom grew up on a beautiful farm in Nova Scotia, and it sounds like the perfect place to live. Of course, from what I hear, farming is one of the hardest jobs in the world... so for now I think I'll settle for just visiting farms and admiring the pastures from the road. After all, I love my job. Chris and I easily made the transition back into our regular TFA routine. The racks have been full all week, and with all the orders coming in for fall there is no sign of them emptying any time soon!

Chris' Brownstone

Voila Chris' most recent FO!

Pattern: Brownstone by Jared Flood (Ravelry link).

Yarn: TFA Green Label Aran Weight in Chris' very own One Of A Kind colourway.

Chris and I collaborated on this knit and it worked out really well. As soon as I saw this pattern on the Brooklyn Tweed blog I knew that Chris would love it. Towards the end of March he enthusiastically cast on for version 1 of this sweater (the sweater pictured here is actually version 2) and with very little help from me, he knit the entire thing in roughly one month. Sounds great right? Wrong, that sweater unfortunately turned out excessively humungous! I don't know where he/we went wrong! Chris is tall and slender, he's just shy of 6'3" and based on his measurements, the measurements of his favorite sweaters, and the measurements on the pattern schematic, we opted to knit him the size medium. His gauge was bang on, and his finished sweater matched exactly what the schematic said it should, but once he put it on it was clear that it was way too big. It fit him much more like an XL than the trim medium we were going for. It's nobody's fault, there's nothing wrong with the pattern or the knitter, but together we just made a bad call when choosing what size to knit...

Because there is nothing worse than working on a sweater for a month only to have it be unwearable, and I was worried that this catastrophe would ruin knitting for Chris forever, I offered to help him knit version 2, this time following the instructions for the size small. I knit the sleeves while he worked on the body, I then joined the sleeves to the body and got him started on the yoke, I worked on it while he wasn't looking, and in about 8 days we had a completed sweater! It's amazing, we must knit very similarly because you really can't tell what parts he knit and where I took over. We're a good match ;)

Chris dyed this custom colourway specifically for this sweater and I'm crazy for it! It's sort of a very subtle, soft version of Shadow. It's grey, but sometimes looks pale blue... it's dreamy. We didn't alternate skeins and though there is minimal pooling it's so subtle that it's not distracting and Chris doesn't mind it. In fact, he finds that the subtle shifts in colour really add to the hand dyed/hand made look. 

Even though he doesn't look very happy here, trust me, he's thrilled with his new sweater!

The sweater is gorgeous and looks really good on him. It was definitely worth knitting twice in order to get it just right. Now that he's got the recipe for his perfect shawl collar pullover perfected, he says he just might knit a few more. We did a few simple mods, lengthened the body and sleeves by a couple of inches in order to accommodate Chris' tall frame. We also omitted the first set of short rows (since in the first big sweater we did both sets of short rows and the finished sweater really drooped in the back, there was just way too much material for Chris, this version sits just right.) And I made up my own way of making the tabs that loop over the toggles. I did a crocheted chain with the yarn held double to make it nice and sturdy and I sewed them to the wrong side rather than the right side. The collar lays perfectly flat and worked out really well. Lastly, I knit the collar on larger needles than the pattern called for (the pattern said to use 4mm and 4.5mm needles for the collar, I used 4.5mm and 5mm needles) I like a pretty generous collar and became a shawl collar pro when working out the details of my I Heart Aran sweater!

This sweater is awesome. I think that Chris looks incredibly handsome in it, and I couldn't be prouder of him for having knit it (at least most of it) himself. Go Chris!