Matchy-Matchy
You all know about the Quercus Socks? Well, when I originally saw
the Oak leaf motif and decided to reverse engineer it to the oak leaf
and acorn motif, my plans were for a sweater for Bill - who has a
thing for Oaks. But at the time I didn't have the money for a
sweater's worth of yarn, so I contented myself with making him a pair
of socks. Then our birthdays rolled around (they are about a week
apart, so we we make it a week long celebration) and my Mom - who had
admired the socks and listened to me babble on about how much I love
the pattern and had really wanted to make a sweater - gave me the
money to buy yarn!
I spent weeks reading through my Elizabeth Zimmermann book
collection and scribbling diagrams and calculations on post it notes,
and finally it was time to cast on.
I settled on a mash up of EZ's Saddle shoulder sweater and Saddle
shoulder hybrid with shirt yoke constructions from Knitting Workshop.
Using some slightly altered numbers for EZ's Percentage system from
Jacqueline Fee's Sweater Workshop.
the Oak panel is modified/reverse engineered from pictures of
several different sweaters featuring one similar, and an Oak leaf
motif (with no acorns) available at the The
Knitting Fool The side cable patterns are from Barbara
Walker's Treasuries with only minor tweaks to help them fit.
Overall I stuck to the regular saddle shoulder pattern (every
round body eating, then sleeve eating, then a few more body eating,
before doing the saddles) but made the saddles a bit wider –
somewhere between the with of the normal saddle shoulder and the
width of shirt back variation – by doing fewer sleeve eating
decreases, and then just knit the back half of the saddles over the
back of the sweater to meet in the center like the shirt back
variation.
I was originally going to do a full
width oak motif on each sleeve, but I decided to only do half, which
made fitting everything in a bit easier, but I still wanted it mostly
centered on the side of the arm, so what I ended up doing was
knitting the panel centered on the outside of the arm and doing the
increases so that they formed a sort of visible seam along the inside
of the arm, but then working the last two increases on only one side
of this ‘seam’ to push the motif towards the back. (I attached
the sleeves to the body with the center ‘seam’ well… centered)
This still left the motif a bit more centered over the top of the
shoulder than I wanted so I converted a handful of the single
body-eating decreases into double decreases to eat up the extra back
sleeve/saddle stitches - effectively shifting the ‘center’ of the
saddle towards the front. I still ended up with the back saddle one
stitch wider than the front, but I don’t think it’s terribly
noticeable or detrimental to the fit.
I had so much fun knitting Bill's sweater that I started to really
want one of my own, and since Mom had given me more than enough yarn
money...
I made a few minor tweaks: making the arms shorter and the upper
arms a bit bigger around, adding a few more stitches around the body
and more short rows across the back.
I Love the sweaters and now Bill and I can be all Matchy-Matchy
when we go the Rhinebeck this year!
Yarn: Knit Picks WOTA Superwash in noble heather and persimmon
heather
Needles: US size 6 (4mm) for the ribbing and US size 7 (4.5mm) for the
rest.
Ravelry project pages: Green, Orange
Bill's sweater has about 4-5 inches positive ease and mine has
about 1 inch negative ease.
I made a Ravelry pattern page here for the sweater and you can
download the rough recipe I used and the charts from there. Just be
warned it's really rough and I don't know how well it will adapt to
other sizes. No matter what, you should really read Elizabeth
Zimmermann's Knitting Workshop sections on sweaters, especially the
saddle shoulder variations, or my instructions may not make very much
sense.
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