I was so lucky to have had a lovely few days at the Country House Knitting Retreat, where I knit for much of the time (as well as socialising and meeting some great new people). I worked mostly on the Caravay sweater (Ravelry link) which I am knitting for Emma. This beautiful sweater, designed by Linda Marveng, is a really big piece of knitting. It is A LOT of knitting – an oversized pullover knitted with fingering weight yarn in a dense overall cabled stitch pattern. I am sure that there are fast knitters who could power through this, but for me it is a major piece of knitting and a big commitment.

I have finished knitting the back and about 2/3 of the front. Below, you can see me holding up the back piece so that you can get an idea of size. Note that this is unblocked and it will gain a bit in both length and width once I’ve blocked it. If you recall that Emma is an XS, you can see how much ease is built into this pullover.

I absolutely adore the texture that this stitch pattern creates, and the beautiful, rich, red of the yarn. (The yarn is Tinde Pelsull, by Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk, in Burgundy.) It’s hard to capture but this photo does a pretty good job:

I’m fairly certain this sweater is going to be a winner and look fantastic on Emma. We are going out there for Christmas, so I am knitting as fast as I can. I would love to have the front and back and two sleeves knitted and blocked before we go, but that seems fairly unlikely at the moment. The more important goal is to have the sweater finished before the trip ends and I fly back home.

That’s the good part of the progress report, which means there is some bad to report as well. You may recall this post a few weeks back about a pattern that was giving me troubles. I made a lot of adjustments, as discussed in that post, and took this with me to the knitting retreat to work on in the evenings, as the Caravay is hard to see at night, and takes some concentration. The result is very pretty in this beautiful dusky pink wool:

However, it’s really huge. And it seems to be getting bigger with every round.

I talked it over with Doug, trying to decide whether to rip it and start over with a smaller size needle, or whether to rip partially back, keeping the ribbing and then decreasing a bunch of stitches. Doug, in his wisdom said “You were having lots of issues already with this pattern. Who’s to say that you won’t keep encountering more problems, even if you get this particular one sorted out. Maybe you should find another pattern.” Bingo. Problem solved. It’s very pretty yarn and it deserves a pattern that I’m happy with. Maybe I will need to write my own.

This weekend there has been little knitting. I’ve been involved in that awful, un-speakable act: house cleaning! Egads! The horror! (I did manage to go see Dune, however; I loved it!) Best wishes, everyone. Stay safe.

Last month, I reported that I had won a prize from Linda Marveng – consisting of my choice of four of Linda’s beautiful sweater designs and the yarn to knit it with, supplied by Hillesvåg Ullvarefabrikk. Today, the package arrived!

Can you tell how much I love it?

Winning the prize led to a massive dilemma over pattern, followed by an even bigger dilemma over colour. (You can see the four patterns on my post here.) I even put up a poll for readers to choose which sweater they thought I should knit. Here are the results (as of a month ago when I took this photo):

I have to tell you honestly that after many, many hours of discussion with Emma, I had already decided to Knit Caravay, shown below, whether or not it came out top of the poll. But it did in any case! (The decision was always between Caravay and Yaelle. I think Yaelle is the more interesting design. But as Emma said “it’s a striking design but it takes more work to style it right. Caravay you can throw on over anything and look gorgeous!”)

Choosing the colour was harder. We spent many hours looking at the colour tiles on the website. Then, we looked up the yarn on Ravelry. There are 1628 projects loaded on Ravelry which were made with this yarn. Emma and I looked at every single one (!), twice (!!), and ended up picking out four possibilities, before narrowing it down to Burgundy. I should add at this point that I am making this for Emma. If it were for me, I would have picked the Burgundy after 20 minutes thought. But Emma was initially drawn to greys or greens and it took a few weeks for her to decide on the red.

Emma, oh my god, you picked good!!!!!

The yarn is gorgeous and the red is so fantastic – rich, beautiful, colour-saturated, deep burgundy red. It really surpasses all of my expectations. Linda told me it was a good colour! She was right. You can see that the yarn arrived with a printed copy of the pattern, but Linda also gifted me with a digital copy on Ravelry. (As an aside, if you are interested in the hand knitted tank I am wearing in these photos, the pattern is Paid in Full, designed by Deb Hoss; I blogged about it here.)

One of the best parts about receiving yarn in the post is unwrapping it, and getting to feel the yarn. This is a brand new yarn to me, and it feels lovely. I can’t wait to start knitting.

We had a heat wave last week, but it has cooled down today. Not quite enough to model my latest project but I will try to do that later in the week. Keep safe everyone!