An Engineer's Guide to Handwork

 What to do when someone has written a pattern that I like, but don't quite love? Well, a lot of math and a bit of revisions. The pattern in question? Artisan by Elizabeth Felgate. I love the sweater - it's cozy, with squishy garter stitch and innovative construction. But... I have a fair amount of depth front to back, so boat necks don't fit me very well. And I wanted a shoulder strap. And I was probably going to use a different yarn than the specification so who knows if my gauge is going to be anything like what the pattern says.  Schematic of my revised Artisan So, Math. Lots of it. To begin with I knit a giant gauge swatch (seriously, it's almost a foot square) and marked out a large square with red yarn, then ran it through the washing machine and dried it flat. Marking the square before washing means that the gauge is measured over whole stitches, which is more accurate than measuring after the fact and trying to estimate partial stitches (also it allows the diff...

Trying on the finished sweater Cockatoo Brae is a Kate Davies pattern, with a plain body and shetland style yoke of stars and trees. I fell in love with this pattern back when the book was first published. I bought the yarn for my version at Kathy's Knits in Edinburgh Scotland, while on a trip to walk the West Highland Way and spend a few days in the city. I used the pattern yarn (not something I always do) but switched the colors - light heather grey for the body, white for the yoke background, and a truncated rainbow in purple-blue-green for the patterning. I chose colors in fairly similar values, so the whole thing would read similarly from far away.  I am different from the pattern as written in pretty much every dimension, as well as not getting the intended gauge. So I basically mathed out the starting number of stitches and figured I would work out the rest as I went. And then I got it wrong - my gauge for the sweater was tighter than I had calculated, so my 300 stitch sweat...