Knit Sisters

In a concerted effort to keep Resolution No. Seven, I have gotten a start on my self-designed sweater.

Actually, it’s less an act of “design” than it is of “bricolage.” In other words, much though I LOVE the way this sweater is turning out (so far), I never had a great creative vision that came to me from Her Kind and Merciful Highness, the Knitting Goddess. I decided that kind of inspiration was, in fact, not forthcoming. I understand my limits, people.

Truly I say unto you, this understanding is a portion of wisdom.

At the same time, it is a portion of wisdom to give new things the old “college try!” Rah, rah, go state! So ever the classic bricoleur, I took some stuff that was ready-to-hand and rejiggered those things. Heavy, heavy assists are coming from Ann Budd, Fiona Ellis, and “my people” at Malabrigo:

In the beginning, there was the Malabrigo. The ten skeins of Malabrigo in scarlet, crying out to be a sweater.

Yarn in hand, my tinkerer’s imagination was fired by Fiona Ellis’s baby sweater in Inspired Cable Knits:

The wonderful “Ripples in time.”

I adore this miniature sweater and the cables it combines, but clearly if I was going to make a similar one for myself, certain scale issues would have to be tackled. Ahem.

Enter Ann Budd. Honestly, I think The Knitter’s Handy Book of Sweater Patterns is an excessively modest title for a book like this. I’d say a book that allows the design-and-mathematically-challenged knitter (Moi? Oui, moi.) to make her dream sweater is way beyond “handy.”

Miraculous, more like. Here’s what I have so far:

Close-up of cables:

In honor of Fiona Ellis and her original sweater’s homage to time, I have decided to call my sweater “Time out of mind,” yet another act of bricolage since this phrase was shamelessly and blatantly robbed from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground./So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind…

So it is, so it will be.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Heavy sweaters, Time out of mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.