anything blue by you?

Note: Yahaira recently posted a collection or red and pink items. I liked the idea, but my collection of red and pink items in my house, office, car, yard, etc. would be quite limited, i must admit. I do have a red wind breaker, and a red rear-light on my bike. I come up extremely short on the pink end of things - my skin is kind of pink, that’s about it.

my hair’s not even dry yet - true messiness comes later in the day

one day, many moons ago, i saw a pattern at my LYS that intrigued me. The pattern was for a gradient sweater by baabajoes. The pattern can be found on baabajoe’s pattern page update 2007: Nowhere! .

I had played with gradients before, though the success, or lack thereof, was limited due to the number of strands (just 2) and difference in colors. The baabajoes pattern calls for 3 strands of Wool Pak yarn, starting with all three in one color, then replacing one strand with the next color, then one more, etc.. This results in a bit smoother transition, if the color difference is not too great.

My LYS didn’t have the Wool Pak yarn, so i decided to use Cascade EcoWool (colors 8025, 8020, 8019, 8018). I called around town and one LYS offered to order it. I placed the order, got 2 skeins and waited for the other 3… and waited… and waited - three months or so. I called the LYS and asked and the owner called me back saying it still hadn’t arrived, but to call her if i still wanted it. Let me say that i am not a fan of fact obfuscation. If you forgot to let me know when the last part of the order came in, tell me. That’s okay. In any case, i called my favorite LYS and asked if they could order it. They could, and it arrived the next week.

Knitting around, instead of flat like the pattern, i zoomed along at 2.25 st/in.. The more i looked at the sweater, the less happy i was with the drop shoulders, so i ended up doing a round yoke (with back of neck shaping to boot, thanks EZ!).

Project summary:
Pattern: Basically my own, inspired by the rag wool sweater from baabajoe’s
Yarn: Cascade EcoWool
Colors: 8025, 8020, 8019,8018
Comments:
On color: I am not really pleased with the middle gradation. I have yarn to make this again, with just three different colors that are closer in shade. Brown-scale next time. Three colors will be less expensive and i had quite a bit of left over yarn on the first and last colors.

On yarn: Cascade EcoWool is quite soft and enjoyable to work with. It would be great single stranded for a sweater as well. It is a loose ply, i wouldn’t recommend it for anything where you want crisp stitch definition, but it is really soft.

On the sweater overall: This sweater is SUPER warm. The three strands plus the stitch pattern and loft of the yarn make this a perfect sweater to curl up with a good book in.