Druid Circle Sweater – Yop 20/21 – Week 29

Hello everyone, and happy Sunday! Joining back in to Year of Projects (Ravelry link) today. I’m making really good progress on my goals for the year, which you can find here.

Today I wanted to share a new finished object! I cast on this sweater almost a year ago and I’m really happy to get it off the needles. It’s a great winter sweater!

• Pattern: Druid Circle Sweater by Shanel Wu
• Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Sport in Dove Heather, Wonderland Heather (light blue), and Baltic Heather (dark blue) 
• Timeline: cast on 2/13/20, cast off 1/8/21

I actually bought the pattern for this when it came out in 2018. I got to know Shanel a little bit through a virtual knitting group they and I were part of around that time. Then, I test knit the complementary hat pattern in early 2019, and really liked making the pattern, but just never got around to getting yarn for the sweater until early last year.

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I made a few slight modifications. First of all, you’ll notice the original pattern doesn’t have colorwork on the bottom. I like adding some on sweaters like like this to kind of balance it out (I did this when I made my Zweig as well). Since I had test knit the hat pattern, I had a non-increasing or decreasing version of the colorwork chart that I could use. This did mean that I had to add a few more stitches to the body so that I had the correct number for the repeats. I added a few stitches at either side of the cast on underarm stitches. I also pretty heavily modified the sleeves. They were written to be quite wide, so I just decreased more than necessary. This was a little tricky given that the colorwork at the bottom is a 10 stitch repeat, and I probably could have decreased a bit less so I started the chart with 10 more stitches, the very ends of the sleeves are a bit tight.

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Overall, I really loved knitting this! It was a great blend between the fun of stranded colorwork and the meditation of stockinette. I’m also happy to have supported a really cool person in Shanel. They are a PhD student around the intersection of fiber and technology, which is really awesome, and check out this awesome, in-depth analysis they wrote on German short rows!

Hope everyone is having a good weekend. If you’re in the US, especially in a Metro area, stay safe out there the next few days.