crab apple

Last night I finished the sweater I’ve been calling crab apple:

A name which suggests just how much it is a homely and unsophisticated version of the Bohus design that originally inspired it:

ring any bells?

I’m now feeling that my last post about knitting without pictures was a bit disingenuous. After going on about the importance of avoiding the false, illusory allure of the image, I now find that I have created a garment that is, in every way, the result of visual stimuli. I confess that the idea of making my own pared down version of a stranded yoke sweater arose after reading Wendy Keele’s Bohus book and being incredibly struck by the sheer visual wonder that is the Wild Apple. However, I’ve also, for the past couple of weeks, been wandering around Edinburgh looking at — and taking in — the stuff-ness of stuff about me, and translating that into ideas for the sweater.

After the terrible July and August weather, things here suddenly turned lovely and golden. And it was the visual stimuli of the STUFF of early September that really inspired the colours of this sweater:

Here is some representative STUFF that I saw over the weekend:

To me there is a satisfying material and visual relationship between these things and the finished sweater:

I can’t show you me in it yet, as it is spending today blocking but it is a lovely fit, as well as feeling very soft and luxurious to wear.

I made the sweater seamlessly in the round, following Meg Swansens’ updated version of EPS. It is knit in Rowan kid classic, which works up as a very light weight aran, at 5 stitches to the inch. I spent some mind boggling hours working out the dot sequence for the yoke. I’m sure a more mathematical mind than mine would not have found the design boggling at all – it is actually incredibly simple once you start thinking of the yoke in terms of rays, or isoceles triangles, rather than rows or rounds. This took me a while, but once it clicked, the whole sequence made sense.

The effect of working with colour in this way – which I’ve never done before – was also very interesting. As I imagined it, the the yoke was going to look dotty. After all, this is how the swatch I made appeared…but then, I was looking at the swatch closely, and never from across the room. The swatch was also made up of a horizontal series of dots, rather than mirroring the curve of the neck, which really affects things. I mean, if you look at the picture with which I began, the overall effect of the yoke is more of a series of stripes, made up of alternating triangles, than of a row of dots. At a distance the yoke looks much more angular and abstract, and far less boingy and dotty, than it does close to.

This doesn’t mean I like it any less, however. On the contrary, the fact that the sweater seemed to take on a life of its own while I was knitting it made it all the more intriguing. The colours of the yarn behaved very differently from how I’d anticipated – some standing out, and some retreating into a more muted state than I’d originally envisaged. I now see, for the first time, how working with colour could be so addictive and exciting. But this doesn’t mean I’ll be turning my hand to intarsia any time soon…

Making my own simple – nay, vulgar – version of a stranded, coloured yoke does give me a renewed appreciation of the the designers and knitters of Bohus and Shetland. The aesthetic of those shimmering sweaters is so beautiful, and the knitting so complex. I only ever used two colours in a row, the background colour never altered, and I was swearing like a trooper when it came to weaving in on the purl side. Maintaining an even tension over so many rows and colour shifts is also a challenge I have yet to fully master. My crab apple is truly humbled when set against the luminous originals that inspired it. But it will do all right for me.

Design: Crab Apple.
Yarn: Rowan Kid Classic. 4 x battle; 1 x tea rose; 1 x frilly; 1 x royal; 1 x victoria; 1 x tattoo.
Needles: 4mm (rib) 5mm (body) 4.5mm (yoke)