The moment I saw the pattern for the Writer’s Block sweater by Alex Capshaw-Taylor, I knew I wanted to make it. All garter stitch, but with a funky vertical twist. And be still my heart but I am powerless to resist stripes. Adorable stripes! I’d never made a sweater, but this cardigan looked both inviting and possible. And I knew I wanted to splurge a bit on the yarn to make it a treat for myself, a cozy, warm, squishy sweater made entirely by me. My favourite yarn of all time is Malabrigo Rios in Anniversario, and I’d been looking for an excuse to use it to make something for myself. Malabrigo Rios is just such a delightful yarn, springy and squishy. And the colours are like no other yarn I’ve come across.
I spent nearly an hour in the yarn store, agonizing over colourways. I ended up splurging an eye-watering $200+, choosing the dark-as-a-cloud Cirrus Gray to contrast the warm multicolour of the Anniversario. I justified the cost partly by the hours and hours I would invest in making the sweater, and partly by imagining how absolutely gorgeous it would be; a sweater that I would wrap myself in every day of the winter, spring, autumn and some summer nights to boot. I imagined the pops of bright Anniversario colour against the moody Cirrus Gray appearing like a rainbow against a cloud.
And that’s when I learned a hard lesson about colour contrast.
I knit up one of the pockets (because OF COURSE the perfect sweater has pockets!) as a gauge swatch, and my brow furrowed in concern as I contemplated it. Even though I had alternated colours with each row, the stripes had disappeared. Or more specifically, failed to appear.
The colours were beautiful together, and the grey set off the jewel tones in the loveliest way – but not in the way that a lighter colour would have. They had almost no contrast. This post from WEBS explains it much better (with examples) than I could have. All that to say, now whenever I am considering colourways for a project, I take a photo of the yarn together to ensure they have sufficient contrast if it’s required. So, back to the yarn store went the unopened skeins of Cirrus Gray (note to self, never turn the skeins into balls until you are SURE the yarn is right for the project) and I came home with a warm but considerably lighter Pearl.
Aha, stripes!!
And so I happily knit endless rows of garter stitch. No counting, just knitting by the inch. Simple, bouncy, happy garter stitch. Every time I picked up my needles, I gazed in loving admiration at those colours. Oh my stars but this would be a gorgeous sweater when it was done. I was torn between loving the simple joy of knitting those endless rows of brilliant colour and my desire to wrap the sweater around me like a hug. Those brilliant, ever-changing saturated colours made my heart sing.
The sweater presented other small challenges to a novice sweater-maker. The shawl collar was made of a band just a few inches wide but 5 feet long, and I found it challenging to keep tension. I also found it nearly impossible to tell the right side from the wrong side with plain garter stitch, but a tip from Reddit taught me that with a long-tail cast on (link to my favourite tutorial) the tail of your yarn will be dangling from the lower right corner of your work on the right side/front of the fabric.
This sweater is knit in parts and then assembled – two sleeves, two front panels, one back panel, one long shawl collar band. The simplicity of the construction was part of the appeal, even though I had no clear idea how to actually assemble the sweater once I had most of the parts made and the pattern seemed to assume one would be able to figure out something so basic. (The pattern was wrong on that point.) I’d reached out to the designer at one point to ask about seams and she introduced me to the mattress stitch.
Once I had most of the pieces constructed, I thought I would start blocking them before assembly. And that’s when this sweater truly broke my heart.
I soaked the back panel in a small bin and gently removed it from the water, being careful to support the heavy wet wool. I spread it out between two fluffy towels and rolled up the lot, pressing and squeezing to remove the excess moisture. I carefully unrolled it and spread the damp back panel across my blocking mats, and that’s I learned an extremely painful lesson about superwash wool. It stretched, and stretched, and stretched. I spent an hour trying to scrunch it back to the proper dimensions, and my formerly perfect stripes were an erratic mess. I had heard superwash wool might stretch but I truly had no idea it would stretch to 20 or more percent of its original size. And then to add insult to injury, the cat walked across it while it was drying overnight, pulling up snags across the back panel.
I was so disappointed by the disaster that was the back panel that it took me a month to pick the project up again and finish knitting the pieces. In that time, I did a little reading and learned that this is a known issue with superwash wool in general and Malabrigo in particular. I was crushed that what I thought was the most beautiful, perfect (and one of the most expensive) yarns I had ever seen could do this without coming with a warning label.
Eventually, I did finish all the pieces and assemble them. When I slipped the cardigan onto my shoulders for the first time after all those months of dreaming about the warm, colourful hug, I sighed instead in disappointment. The drape was unflattering, the fit was comically oversized even on a girl who wears almost everything oversized by default, and the stretch was ridiculous. All those hours, all that money — and I didn’t love, didn’t even LIKE the final product. It wasn’t even comfortable to wear, it was heavy and bulky in an unpleasant way. It’s still sitting like a scandal in my closet, one pocket left to be sewn on before I can mark it as complete in my Ravelry queue, where it has been sitting for a year.
And I kid you not (knot!), that’s when I took up embroidery.