Tortoise and Hare: A Vest Success!

I've been eyeing Kate Davies Tortoise & Hare sweater pattern for a few years--talk about adorable--and knew I had to knit this colorwork short sleeved sweater. The thing that finally pushed me over the Tortoise and Hare edge was when Jaime and I visited Shetland this fall. The natural colors of Shetland yarn at Jamieson + Smith's were irresistible and I knew it was time to make this.

You might notice that my Tortoise & Hare is not, in fact, a sweater, but an adorable vest! I love it as a vest, but here is the real story: that adaptation is mostly due to me rushing head over heels into this project and not doing a proper gauge swatch for my colorwork. Whoopsiedaisies. Apparently, I knit colorwork really loosely, which is weird, right? Here is how I turned a knitting disaster into a knitting success...

Check out the Vikkel braid action.

Knitting along, with just a tiny bit of unease about my gauge, I finished the body of the sweater and steeked open the neck and armholes (the pattern is knit entirely in the round and steeked in these three places). I tried it on and it was ridiculously huge in the shoulders. Like, you could fit a pair of football shoulder pads in it huge. After several months of knitting, this was pretty devastating.

I couldn't bear to rip out and reknit a single tortoise or a hare, so I decided to take my garment sewing and steeking skills to the next level. A beloved Shetland souvenir vest from my trip to Scotland became my pattern. I cut my oversized sweater shoulders down to size. After cutting away the excess fabric, I kitchenered the shoulder seams back together. From there I picked up stitches for the arm holes and neckline and finished them with a simple 2x2 rib.

It was a vest success! 

I love my new vest. I also maybe learned a little lesson about gauge....but also about owning my mistakes. Take that, knitting disaster!

Shetland Wool Week continues with Jaime's Sheep Heid

It's Shetland Wool Week right now in Shetland and we are celebrating here at Fancy Tiger Crafts! When we were in Shetland this summer, I knew one thing: I had to buy all the colors of Shetland wool and then knit with them. Thank goodness, Scottish designer Kate Davies already had this idea and made an awesome hat pattern called Sheep Heid that does just this. 

Shetland sheep come in 11 recognized colors and their wool is sorted by color and then milled into 9 different colors of naturally colored, un-dyed yarn. The colors range from white to black with shades of browns and grays in between. Kate Davies uses all 9 natural colors of Shetland yarn in her Sheep Heid pattern, which I knit on the plane ride back to the states. This hat is a fair isle pattern that features sheep across the brim and rams on the crown - brilliant. 

photo by Jess Eaton and Jesse Dawson of  www.jldawson.com

I purchased all the yarn at the Jamieson + Smith store in Lerwick, Shetland while visiting. I started knitting my hat right away, casting on somewhere in Skye, knitting straight through the 20 hours of travel time and two plane rides it took to get home. It was a bit cumbersome to bring a small hat project that required 9 balls of yarn onto a plane, but I managed.

This is what my face looks like when I get to buy all the colors of Shetland wool!

I finished my hat within a week of being back in the states - what a fantastic souvenir of our wool-filled travels to Scotland!

In case you can't make the trek to Shetland, we fell so in love with this yarn that we are now carrying it here at Fancy Tiger Crafts.

The fair-isle pattern of this hat was pretty slow going for me, but I am getting so much better at colorwork! The hat ended up being a bit big so I took Kate Davies' advice and lightly fulled it. Magic!! The yarn bloomed, the stitches settled in and my hat looks fantastic after some light agitation in hot water.

The design of this hat is superb - it captures the beauty of the natural colors of Shetland wool in a way that also acknowledges the traditional fair isle designs of the island. Also...SHEEP!