Sweetness

Finishing the Orals and the school year has made me want to do nothing but fall back on sheer relaxing pleasure knitting, which for me, unsurprisingly, is making top-down baby sweaters. I bought this yarn back in April to help sweeten a sort of miserable birthday spent alone and under the crushing stress of last-minute studying, and it actually did help.

The yarn is Sweet Georgia Tough Love Sock in "Cedar" with Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Andersonville" as a contrast. They looked great together in the skein because there was a little touch of the cedar color in the Lorna's Laces. I bought them intending to make the mosaic-yoke "Cardigan B" from my "Steps to Stranded" patterns, but when I came to knitting the mosaic part, that stripe of cedar color turned out to muddy the crispness of the pattern, and my pretty squares looked more like smudges. So I improvised something that would work with this yarn.


Instead of six rows of mosaic pattern in alternating sequence, I worked four rows of garter stitch in the Lorna's Laces separated by two rows of stockinette in the Sweet Georgia. The beginning of each garter stitch section is where I worked my yoke increases.

I think it looks very nice, and it's a sweet little variation on the pattern. So if you're looking for a variation on the "Steps to Stranded" pattern, I'd recommend it, especially with yarns that are just a little too close in color to make the most of a stranded or mosaic pattern.


A note on the yarn: in my previous post I had expressed some doubt about the Sweet Georgia yarn, but I rescind that comment: after wet-blocking this yarn is heavenly -- soft and sort of silky feeling with no scratchiness, and it seems to have lost the fuzziness that was making me worry about how well it will hold up. I think if I were knitting socks with it I would still knit them at a pretty tight gauge just to be sure -- and this yarn is a relatively fat sockweight, so knitting on one's normal sock needles would already be knitting it pretty tightly. But at the looser gauge of this baby garment, it drapes beautifully.