FO and Some Thoughts on BT

I’ve finished my lovely Skydottir Icelandic pullover! I love it! The fit is exceptional, the shape is sublime, the pattern was perfect and easy to follow. It would be a cinch to customize this pattern with one’s own motifs; In fact, I added the peeries at the cuffs and lower edge. I’m dying to make this sweater again with my own peeries at the yoke and cuffs and using this wonderful Rowan Pure Wool Worsted that’s just come in at the shop. After this horrible winter, I’m determined to spend the summer months knitting winter sweaters.

This is the second Brooklyn Tweed pattern I’ve worked and I must say, I love ’em! Each pattern is like a mini-knitting workshop. They are studded with new techniques, yet organized in such a way that one could use tried and true methods instead. The details are amazing. Among the many pearls of wisdom I’ve discovered while working BT patterns is an idea I’d sort of glossed over in the past: yarn dominance in stranded knitting. Like many, I quite naturally defaulted to working the background color with my right hand (I’m a thrower) while carrying the contrast color in my right, but there are places where a single stitch of background color gets lost in a sea of contrast. I found, through working this pattern, that I must think about every round, determining which yarn should be dominant. Here’s an example:

Here are two identical pattern rounds. I wasn’t paying attention on the first (lower) round, but look what happened when I switched the light-colored yarn to my dominant (left) hand! What a magical difference. Done right, one could use this dominance idea to actually ‘paint’ with stitches. I’m so impressed!

I wasn’t impressed with the neck bind-off prescribed by the pattern, however. I’d planned to use this tubular bind-off from Tech-Knitting. I used it on the Isolde Teague “Rose Red” beret last year and should have used it here. Oh well, small price to pay.