fruity

A pattern from Rowan Classics Garden Collection. Originally a beaded, textured scoop neck pull-over, I've replaced the beads with a purl stitch on the advice of Alpaca Woman. It's knitted in cashcotton, a lovely cotton, cashmere, angora, viscose and polyamide blend, that is buttery soft. I'm not convinced that it is all that summery a yarn, but the mixed texture does give it an exceedingly pretty heathery look. The slighty fuzziness obscures the purl stitches and depending on movement, the purls can seem to appear and disappear.

The angora does shed and the yarn is fragile. It looks a bit worn when ripped and isn't that elastic (due to cotton content), so tension differences will show up. The colour range is also limited, mostly pastel, summery shades.

Pattern Source: Yarn: # of balls: Notions: Needles: Meterage: Yarn Source: Colour: Size: Started: Finished: Resting : Recipient :

Rowan Classis Rowan CashCotton 8 balls n/a 2.75mm, 3.25mm 160 meters/50g Peter Jones Seafoam something between the 36 and 38 (don't ask) 19 March 2005 25 May 2005 30-April - 21 May Me

We went to a Rowan Workshop in March and got to play with this yarn. We all loved the scoop and the bell sleeve on fruity and decided to work on it together. (we = me, Amelia and Alapaca Woman). The thing about 4 ply sweaters is, labour of love. While deceptively simple, you do need to pay attention to the increases, decreases and where to put those little purl stitches.

The bell sleeves took forever to finish. Beware of length..! I chopped off about an inch and should really had chopped another off.



Project Notes

1. I did 2 extra rows on the neckline.





2. With a bit of blocking the rolling that you see here, does stay flat.





3. The directions for the sweet, little frilly edging is misleading. You end up binding off approximate 3 out of 7 stitches. (The instruction implies roughly 3 out of 6, but if you did exactly what it said without looking at the number of stitches remaining, you'll end up casting on 200+ stitches again!)





4. Plenty of yarn left over (more than half a ball) and I joined at the end whenever possible (there's one place that there wasn't an end join and that was becase there was a knot. 1 knot in 8 balls isn't bad. Although, there were some randon lengths in the ball, which I'm told was due to a problem with the cutting mechanism and not a dodgey way to make up the weight of the skein.







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