Sunday 9 August 2015

Beautiful Bluebells - 1940's Jumper

Hello! It's been a while, I do apologise.  

Things have been a bit busy round here.  There's been the normal end of term shenanigans of frantic marking and box ticking; so glad school has finished for the summer.  I've been sewing some blouses, making lots of 2.5" hexies for my first ever quilt and doing plenty of knitting.  We've had family visiting us and then we travelled West to stay with the Mr's family for a couple of weeks.  I'm quite worn out!  

We're home now, returning to a boiler that wouldn't light.  The boiler repair man has been and gone and given our ancient old boiler a new lease of life, for now, and the Mr has just taken the girls to the local computer shop to see whether they can recover the data from the hard drive of his less than two year old laptop!  

So I have about an hour to myself, and what better way to spend it than showing you one of my top five favourite woollies.

This recent jumper is a commission piece knitted for the lovely Kitty Lou.  An Australian pattern from the 1940's, you can find the pattern here, the wool chosen was a gorgeous dull gold colour by Patons, part of their Diploma Gold 4 ply range.  


The pattern repeat is worked over 36 rows, and although the design looks quite complicated, there is a logic to the pattern.  However, for ease of working, I did type up the 36 pattern repeats into a word document which helped keep me on track.
 

Unlike the other bluebell one I did, which you can see here, the yoke on this one was nice and simple, so no pattern matching up and over the shoulders.  

Back and front knitted up well, albeit slowly, but the sleeves were a right pain in the rear end.  The shaping from the underarms simply didn't work out.  I tried and ripped them back 3 times before disparing and writing my own shaping instructions.  I won't lie, tears were shed.  Tears of sheer furry!  :)  I think there was an error in the pattern.  My mother in law mooted something along the lines of a bad workman blaiming his tools, but I don't think so.  


Following the picture on the front of the pattern book, I still managed to achieve the same look.  The boxy sleeves turned out really well, and the knitted shoulder pads finish the look off perfectly.


Although there was the slipup with the sleeves, this was one of my favourite jumpers to work on.  I'm really impressed with the quality of Paton's Diploma.  It's heavier than some of other 4 ply brands, so the jumper weighs in at just under 1lb, but the beautiful quality of the wool shows off the intricate detail perfectly. 






Wool - Patons Diploma 4 ply in Gold
Weight used - 9 balls
Time taken - 100+ hours