Done: Electric Bunny Sweater

I suppose this would be the first finished object of 2012, but that just doesn't seem right since most of the knitting was done in 2011.

In fact, the sweater was really basically done on New Year's Eve, I just had to seam the underarms and ran out of time before we went out and about. The knitting was done. The ends were woven it. There were just two inconvenient holes.

We had a nice, quite New Year's Eve with some family. We have a niece about 45 minutes south of us and she had her parents and siblings over as well. Just some finger food and Hubby brought a bottle of sparking wine.


Anyway, when we finally woke up on January 1 I took the time to finish it off.

I was a little concerned about the seaming since the fabric in that area is fairly pastel and the yarn I was using was dark purple and white. Happily, like any good mattress stitch seam, the purple yarn was swallowed up and is mostly invisible. Yippee!

The colors are fairly accurate in this picture. You can't see that the sleeves are slightly different in both color intensity and sequence, but I think that is part of the charm.

The yarn is hand dyed and spun so there are slight variations. And, actually, it does run through from bright primary to slightly softer.

I knit the right sleeve first, with the orange band at the top. When it came to the left sleeve I considered trying to make them match, but it would have involved a lot of cutting and reconfiguring of yarn and I decided against it. I figured with the yellow start the sleeves would be similar enough.

Besides, how annoying would it have been if I'd gone through all that effort and they still hadn't matched, right?

In addition to being a finished project that is warm and snuggly, this sweater is knit from Rhinebeck yarn.

Yipee!

I'm very proud of myself for having used the yarn in the same year I bought it. haha!

Project Recap
Yarn: http://jamierainbowyarn.com/ that I bought at Rhinebeck.
I used about a skein and a half of her standard rainbow/white yarn for the yoke and cuffs. (The yoke took one entire skein.)

align="left" hspace="5" vspace="5"The body and sleeves are in a custom color she spun for me that is a more solid rainbow. The color changes are more gradual with just slight overlaps where the color transitions from one to the next.

I had 4 skeins of the custom color. I used about 2.5 or 3 skeins. (Which is to say I have one entire skein leftover and about 1/4 each of the two skeins I used for the sleeves.)

So the fourth skein, which was an insurance skein, wasn't needed. But I'm happy I had it. If I'd been knitting the sleeves, watching the skeins decrease, I would have been sweating.

Needles: US 10 for the body. US 8 for the ribbings.

Pattern: My own design. Based on the principles outlined in Righette’s Sweater Design in Plain English and Bernard’s Custom Knits.

For now the leftover yarn will be put into stash, but I'm thinking I'll make another cropped poncho with it.

I considered a triangular shawl, but when I free-form those I'm not usually happy with the results. And scarves bore me to tears. And I really like my cropped poncho. And I think the yarn should be used for something I can snuggle into.

Well, knitting production is off to a good start. On to the next project!