Winter 2020, the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had a blast making all sorts of handmade stuff for the nieces and nephews. Sweaters, cardigans, hats, toys… all personalised for each of them.
Winter 2021 was… less enthusiastic. Even though I had tried to use up the stash yarn from the previous Yule’s gifts, I still had a lot of it lying around (and I still do — more on that in another post). My job had gone from very busy to very even busier, which meant that rather than starting my Yule knitting in July like I had in 2020, I’d barely started by the start of November 2021.
And, as with a lot of other people, the pandemic walls had really started to close in. As i write this, I’m still working from home (which I love) and I’m still wearing a mask in shared spaces (which I don’t love, but with the case rates where I live it’s still a necessity). It’s been draining, and what’s happening on the geopolitical stage is not helping.
Still, it was Yule, and I wanted to make something. I decided to skip the nephews because they’re still too little to really appreciate handmade stuff (and I did the same for the nieces at that age), but I wanted to make the nieces something.
Inspiration came when I saw that 1980s sweaters with fluffy, chunky yarn knit on large needles were back on display in clothing shops. That reminded me that the original 80s sweaters were based on big-needle knits from the late 1960s. Grey for Niece the Younger, and black for Niece the Elder.
And when it comes to big-needle knits from the 1960s, I know that there happens to be a sweater pattern that was itself designed to be a quick, easy, last-minute gift: Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Hurry-Up Last Minute Sweater (aka the Wishbone Sweater for its armhole/shoulder shaping), from Knitter’s Almanac, still my favourite of all her books.
Knitting for the nieces lately has been a bit fraught, since they have both acquired the troublesome tendency of growing faster than I can knit them things. I needed to make something that would look sufficiently fashionable, but change gracefully from an oversized to a regular-sized sweater.
So I read through the Wishbone instructions, spent way more time on Pinterest than the projects demanded, and decided to rib the sleeves, neck, and body edging.
The sweater basically is the Wishbone, using Zimmermann’s EPS for sizing and stitch counts. I did some tweaking so that there would be a K2 at the centre top of each sleeve (made the neck shaping easier). Zimmermann’s original design calls for shoulder shaping along the tops of the shoulders, but since I didn’t want to have the rib columns get interrupted, I just decreased twice as much on the raglan lines to make up for it. In stocking stitch this would be risky, but since the sleeves and shoulders have stretchy ribbing, the fabric adjusts very nicely.
Once I got to the neck, I realised that due to the shaping, the shoulders were tilted up and the centre front and back neck was tilted down, like this:
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I incorporated some short rows to make everything level, and that took care of that.
The nice thing about the ribbed raglan is that the nieces’ shoulders don’t have to align with any particular shaping or seam line to get a good fit. With any luck, they’ll be able to at least get a few years out of these before they’re too small to wear.