the finished article.
i'm not that sure that i actually like it now it's finished; i love the colours and the stripes, but am not so sure on the flowers now, or at least not so sure on my knitting of them! however they were the most fun part of the knitting and the thought of knitting them got me through the boring stocking stitch parts of the body pieces (and then i was glad to get back to mindless stocking stitch when the intarsia was over...). time will tell if i get used to having a large flowered chest!
i'm making this jumper from rowan mag 31 for myself. i haven't yet decided if i'm putting the flowery intarsia bit on the front or not i think i'm going with the flowers, i like the stripey sleeves best but i think the flowers will be cool too. one of the things that strikes me about this jumper is that if it had been made up in girly colours in the mag i'd probably have hated it but in browns, blues and greens i think it's really rather nice.
the yarn i'm using is rowan handknit dk cotton in the original colours used in the pattern. artichoke is a discontinued colour but i hunted around the web and found some on sale. that's a story in itself:
i ordered all the yarn for this jumper from an online source (i won't name them as they've given me good service before). i ordered all four colours of yarn including the one discontinued colour which they were selling with a little annotation to say they had "24 balls left". i only wanted 2 balls of that colour so i thought i was in luck. my order was pretty obviously all the yarn for a single project but they shipped the yarn to me missing the discontinued colour out, not contacting me to ask if i'd like an alternative or if i still wanted the rest of the yarn. fortunately i found another online shop to sell me the two balls of the discontinued colour but i'd rather have given all my business to this second shop. the first shop will be lucky to get my business again.
anyway, the colours i now have are:
i started knitting this jumper in february 2004 and knit the back and front pieces first. i experimented with knitting both the sleeves simultaneously. i thought i might get bored with this but i managed to keep going with it until the end. i finished knitting both sleeves right at the end of april. i've now got all the ends sewn in and the neckband knitted too and just the sewing together to go. jumper finished entirely in the middle of may 2004 after managing to screw up the square set in sleeves (you have to sew the handful of stitches cast off on the body at the armhole to the top of the sleeve side.)
i have tons of yarn left over! including an entire ball of A, B and D! this has happened before and i'm beginning to wonder if rowan only knit up extra small sizes and then randomly guess how much more yarn you'll need for the bigger sizes. there doesn't seem to be much logic to the yarn requirements. of course if i decided to buy less yarn for my next project i'd be bound to run out... i'd rather be safe then save a few quid on yarn really.
