Snow White

I finally finished a sweater for Gaby I cast on on January 2nd this year! The sweater is my own design, using the cables from a pattern I've already knitted before - Tre Archi by Louisa Harding. Gaby wanted a fitted white sweater with sequins and bishop sleeves and the Tre Archi silhouette in my previous modification seemed to fit the bill.

I ordered a bobbin of sequin yarn - thin polyester thread with tiny, tiny sequins, almost invisible, yet festive enough for my liking. I combined it with a bobbin of Italian 100% merino in off white color and happily started knitting on the second day of the new year. However, i soon discovered that the polyester thread was too coarse and artificial and i did not like the resulting texture. I drudged along until I finished the body, but i had lost all of my mojo and put the sweater aside.

And it stayed in a project bag until a couple of weeks ago, when I came upon it while in search of a cable needle to finish my purple raglan sweater. I took it out of the bag and gave the body a good bath and blocking. The merino bloomed after the bath and transformed the texture of the knitting, filling in the gaps between the stitches. The hem was curling and the sweater seemed a bit short, so I unraveled it and finished it anew with smaller needles and grafting. And then I added bishop sleeves my own design.

The back finishes with a key-hole opening, which I have lightly sewn up for now. The plan is to add a ribbon and close it by tying the ribbon, but as the sweater is for Gaby and she's away until Christmas, I'll wait for her to choose the closure she prefers.

Pattern: Snow White, personal design using Tre Archi cables

Yarn: Merino Extrafine, 375 m / 100 g, 100% merino and
Paillettes 1, 100% polyester, 780 m / 100 g, total weight of the sweater: 400 g

Needle: 4 mm (body), 3.5 mm (cables and hems), 3 mm (sleeve hems)

Time to knit: a year :)

Tre Archi Sweater

My latest most favourite sweater - Tre Archi by Louisa Harding, knit in the softest merino I've ever tried - Zegna Baruffa Cashwool. It is yet another one of those Italian wool bobbin yarns I've been ordering online lately. I've got two more colors of this yarn - dark green and asphalt and the latter is going to turn into another sweater for me too, probably soon.

Pattern: Tre Archi by Louisa Harding
Yarn: Zegna Baruffa Cashwool 8, dark bordeaux, 330 g
Needle: 3.5 mm, 4 mm
Time to knit: two weeks

Notes and modifications:
1. From the original pattern I used only the overall visual concept and the charts for the cables, but I chose to make mine a longer and fitted sweater. I knit the body and the sleeves in the round and made my own calculations for the stitches and rows. The arches for the body are placed low, so that the most narrow part of the cables would fall at the waist. Thus I started with 221 sts - 17 repeats of the cable and ended at the waist with 152 sts. Then I increased the stitches gradually on both sided until the armholes and split the knitting for the back and the front.

2. The original beginning with two rows of garter stitch curled despite my efforts to block it, so I carefully unravelled the cast on row and made the bottom end of the sweater symmetrical to the neckband. That should have been my logical choice from the beginning, I think this edge is much more beautiful and there's no danger of rolling up.

3. For the sleeves I cast on 60 sts, increased to 65 sts in the first knit row for 5 repeats of the cables, knitted in the round. This gave me 45 sts at the end of the cabled part. Then I gradually increased to 65 sts to the armholes, adding two new stitches every 10 rows. I sewed the sleeves to the body using mattress stitch.

I am absolutely thrilled with the result - so much my type of sweater - simple, elegant and feminine.