The 100 gram sweater

I started spinning this yarn for the tour de Fleece 2011 on a homemade supported spindle that I had made. The spinning took forever to complete, and when I was skeining skein I knew why. I got over 800 yards of lace weight from 4oz, something I had never done before. The fiber was Faulkland wool handyed by Fat Cat Knits in the colorway "Ester". I had 4ozs.

Then I started thinking about the concept of a shawl that I could wear everywhere, including maybe the various offices I work at. I have no idea why I was thinking "socially acceptable shawl" as I live in Spain and shawls are used daily here.

I was hoping to make, maybe, a little lace vest. I had no idea how much tee I could get out of 800 yards. I would start out with the lace yoke of the vest and work my way down as far as I could go. I used the shaping of the yoke from this pattern and then worked the math to increase for the non-lacy part of the yoke.

The lace pattern was "Wings from the Swan" p.306 from Barbara Walkers 2nd treasury, which I charted by hand.

I put the lace panel running down the middle front and the middle back of the piece. I did this mostly so that I could make the yarn go further, ie a longer tee. For the front lace panel I cast on the 20 stitches (out of 23) for the lace panel in order to leave a stylized gap in the front. I might put buttons on one side of the gap. I left YO buttonholes on the other side.

I had to rip back about 4 inches to alternate the ends of the skein as a big purple stripe was happening right at my bust line. I continued alternating until I reached my hips. I did not do any waist shaping because I was aware that this pattern had negative ease. (Maybe too much negative ease.) I knit in the round using my new cubics knit pro needles until I thought that I would run out of yarn soon. I switched to garter stitch in the round for an inch and then I did some spaced increases every-other-row over the next 6 rounds.

For the sleeves I used the stitches on waist yarn and picked up 10 stitches that was provisionally cast on before and knit three rounds before switching to a K1P1 rib for 10 rounds and binding off in purl.