I was already cold, and it was still summer in 1999. No sweaters fit due to my post partum body and extended nursing. I had a large box of yarn, sent to me by a string of relatives and friends, in answer to prayer, and no time to design it all from scratch. Was it really against my integrity as a designing knitter to skip going through the entire design process?
What a silly question.
There are times in life you bake a scratch cake and mix a scratch pudding and glaze and there are times you buy a nice Boston Creme Pie and call it good. This was a go to the bakery knitting moment.
I pulled out my Vogue Knitting Magazines (they are so fashion forward, if you wait a few years, the patterns stop looking weird.) If I had had Ravelry at the that time, I would have looked up my yarns so see what weights they were officially, then searched on patterns that used that weight and were in Vogue Knitting. Not that all late ’80’s patterns are in the data base, though it’s surprising what does show up.
My orange yarn was a double strand of Fair Isle like yarn. It was fuzzy, somewhat springy, but not with a smooth stitch definition. The sweater I wanted to adapt was a double breasted cabled cardigan with a portrait collar by Perry Ellis. Why I knew I loved that design I don’t know, the photo is dark on dark with the model in an artistic pose which obscures most of the details of the sweater. It must have been the schematic that sold me. When I look at schematics, it’s like seeing a coloring page, I can fill in the details myself with more freedom than if I look too carefully at the photograph.
My yarn was good for simple stockinette, or color work. I wanted that Perry Ellis sweater. But I had a yarn shortage.
It was time to pretend I was Coco Chanel. Buy a fancy hat, remove most of the trimmings, resell it for more money than it originally sold for. Thoughtful simplification can be hard work! The fringe didn’t add warmth (just cool drama.) Good bye fringe.
Cables wouldn’t show up in my fuzzy yarn, and took a lot of yarn to make. I swatched as few knit/purl patterns (interest for little yarn) mistake rib showed up, and stockinette looked pretty. The waist, cuffs, front panels and collar would be done in mistake rib, the rest in stockinette. I had to stop the collar a few rows shy of the point, but I had yarn for everything else.
Those large swatches gave me the numbers I needed to plug into the schematic in my size (saving me a lot of time discovering arm hole depth, collar angles, neckline widths…) I unraveled them in the end to get more yardage. Both the row gauge and stitch gauge were useful in calculating the collar.
The v-neck allowed for easy (and warm) nursing, the collar could flip over the baby if he was chilly too. It was cozy winter.