Well Worth the Wait

As promised, I have a finished sweater to share with you this morning!

Pattern: Birch Pullover by Andrea Mowry, size 2 (38 in./96.5 cm bust)
Yarn: Dusty Tree Dyeworks Root Fingering (100% superwash American Merino), 4.47 skeins/1788 yds.
Needles: US 3/3.25 mm
Started/Completed: March 19, 2023/January 18, 2024

To say I'm thrilled with how this sweater turned out would be an understatement. I am now kicking myself for letting it sit in a project bag for so many months when I could have been wearing it all fall. It fits perfectly, with just the right amount of positive ease to feel like a cozy sweatshirt-type garment but not so much that it feels sloppy. And between the bounciness of the yarn and the thickness of the half fisherman's rib stitch, the fabric is incredibly cozy.

The yarn I used is from a local very small-batch dyer who started out making soap and branched into yarn because she's also a knitter. I've been using Rebecca's soap for years and have used her yarn a number of times before, including for one of my shawl designs (Ravelry link), but this was the first time I'd used multiple skeins for a garment. Because she dyes in such small batches, she has no colorways and thus every skein is one of a kind. So when I picked up the five skeins I used for this sweater, they were all similar but not the same, and I arranged them in a lightest-to-darkest gradient:

As I knit the sweater and got to the end of one skein, I began alternating skeins every round to incorporate the new one. I also wound off about 30% of each skein once I started the body so that I'd be able to match, more or less, the body and the sleeves. If you enlarge the photo above, you'll see that the ends of the sleeves are darker than the bottom of the body; I didn't end up using the fifth/darkest skein at all on the body but did need it for the sleeves, but as the sleeves are actually longer than the body, I think that makes perfect sense and works quite well. The color matching wasn't perfect, but I don't think that really matters or that you can really tell because all the skeins had enough variation in color and the texture of the stitch pattern masks it well.

The color is most accurate in the top photo, but here's  detail of the side and one sleeve. I really like how the raglan increases are incorporated into the stitch pattern. Another nice touch is the tubular cast-on for the neckline and bind-offs for the body and sleeve cuffs:

Aside from my color management, the only modification I made to the pattern was to work two extra decreases on my sleeves, mainly because I have ridiculously tiny wrists and didn't want my cuffs to be gaping. And though this stitch pattern makes for a dense row gauge and thus not an especially fast knit, the cast-on and bind-off dates aren't really an accurate representation of how long it took me to knit. I looked at the calendar and figured out exactly how long it took me: 14 days last March (to knit the yoke to the sleeve/body separation), 15 days in December (to complete the body), and 18 days in January (to knit the sleeves -- while also working on other projects). The total time is 47 days, or about a month and a half. When you consider that I was working full time except for those days in December, that's still pretty impressive.

I had such a positive experience with this pattern that I'm going to do another Andrea Mowry pattern for my next one, and I've already swatched and wound my yarn and will be casting on soon:

The orange yarn is the same base, leftover from another sweater

I also promised you an update on Mo's competition over the weekend. I had hoped to have big, exciting news of a win, but her team missed out on first place by one point. The team that took home the trophy is the same one as last year, from a big suburban district (the one where I taught in my former professional life, actually) and with something like 36 team members compared to the 10 on Mo's team. Even discounting my admitted bias, I think her team had a much better presentation. She thinks the deciding factor was the essay; the other team won the special award for the best essay, so that would make sense. But her team won three special awards, including Students' Choice and one from a national professional engineers' association, so they have a lot to be proud of. And we also don't have to worry about getting her to Washington, D.C., in February!

It's still quite cold here this morning, but we're supposed to get above freezing today and be much warmer (though with rain in the forecast) this week! I'm going to attempt to go for a run -- my first since last Monday -- this morning, but we'll see how I manage with some sidewalks still covered in snow. I hope you all have a good start to your week!