The Shifty Saga- part 1
Original yarn choice for my Shifty Sweater
Shifty by Andrea Mowry is an amazingly beautiful sweater with what looks like a very complex pattern but is really a very simple pattern using mosaic knitting that creates the most beautiful texture. The key to Shifty is in the yarn. Andrea uses a specific type of yarn known as handspun yarn which creates the most beautiful marled and self-striping yarn. Well, if you couldn’t already tell from the title of this post, this sweater and I have quite a history together with many ups and downs. This will be the first post in a series of posts about my adventure trying and failing (hopefully finally succeeding) at knitting this sweater. There were tears, temper tantrums and frequent frogging in this knitting journey but hey this blog is called Knitting Confessions for a reason.
Original swatch using Hedgehog Fibres yarn
I have long marveled at this beautiful hand spun yarn and wondered what it would be like to knit with yarn like this. I held off for a long time because it is expensive. There is a good reason why this yarn is so expensive, it is made from two different strands of yarn that are handspun or machine spun together to give it its unique look. I have written several blog posts about my love hate relationship with this yarn over it’s price and how it makes it unaffordable to many knitters out there. I wrote how I was determined to make this sweater using yarn from stash. I had the most amazing fade from Hedgehog Fibres that I thought would be perfect for this pattern. The problem then came in trying to find a main color that would work with this beautiful fade. It was really hard because there are so many different colors in this yarn and the base starts off white and fades to blue. I picked a medium grey that seemed to work with the yarn, but I knew there would be some parts that would sort of blend in. I did the whole black and white test and it seemed to have enough contrast to work, but the swatch would be the real test. The swatch was hit or miss honestly. The original pattern uses Spincycle Yarns for both the main color and the contrast colors meaning that not only are the textured blips fading from one color to the next but so is the background. Well because I was knitting with a fade and a solid color this meant I couldn’t get the same look as the sample. I didn’t really realize this at the time so I really struggled to find a swatch I liked, I tried both using the fade as the main color and as the blips to see which one I liked best. I ended up going with using the fade as the blips and the grey as the main color. I had seen several other sweaters that did this and thought they looked really good. Next up would be to try actually knitting the sweater and see how it turned out.
Well needless to say when I went to knit the sweater it did not meet my expectations. I wanted it to look like the sample and well that wouldn’t be possible since I wasn’t using the same type of yarn. The blips just didn’t seem to pop the way they did in other people’s projects and the main color and the fade blended too much for my personal taste. After getting about half way through the yoke I decided to frog the project and try again switching the solid color and the fade to see if that gave me the result I wanted. Luckily I decided to knit a swatch first and just really didn’t like it. I was so frustrated, why wasn’t this turning out the way I wanted it to? I loved the yarn and the pattern so in theory I should have loved how it was turning out, right? Wrong, I really didn’t like it and kept comparing my project to others and it just made me feel more frustrated and upset that mine didn’t look like theirs. It was at this point I decided just to put the project down and come back to it after we had both had some breathing room. Maybe I would find better yarn in my stash or figure out a way to make the yarn I originally wanted to use work… maybe.
