Jumper one went down so well that I started plotting jumper two. After all, why spend time thinking of a birthday present when you could spend time knitting it! During my initial searches for jumper one, I'd been really impressed with the look of this pattern (Florestan). Okay, large parts of it are a little over-fussy but the main cables look great. Plus, it was in double knit, which means lots of yarn options. I'm ashamed to say that I've become a little averse to buying pattern since discovering the wealth of free ones on Ravelry but I coughed up and downloaded the pattern.
What a disappointment. It takes a lot for me to write about a pattern in these sorts of negative terms but I couldn't believe I'd paid money for such a sparsely written, badly described pattern. The PDF is 11 pages long, great! Only three of those pages have jumper instructions on. Not so great. Two of those pages only have a single column of instructions. Not great at all. The rest is ten photos and three pages of abbreviations and tips and tricks. I'm a reasonably experienced knitter and I found those two columns hard going. And that was only the sleeves...
In parallel to my pattern searching, cable deliberating and general faffing, I had a decision to make about the yarn. Jumper one had gone down well in Rowan Pure Wool so that was the logical choice. I still had four balls left so that was a chunk of the cost sorted already, all I needed was another 16 or so from Get Knitted. Yes, there'd be a risk about the dye lots but I could do the arms in the old balls and the body in the new ones and it'd look fine. It even gave me a chance to start the arms before my order arrived.
As I'd expected for that sort of quantity, Get Knitted was out of stock but promised to order it in. I wasn't worried, why would I be? And then they said that Rowan was out of stock. That's when I was worried.
To cut an extremely long story short, everywhere that had stock was too expensive (John Lewis). Everywhere that was affordable had to order from Rowan and, when the manufacturer is out of stock, you can be pretty certain that birthday present isn't going to be ready. All this waiting and investigation had eaten up precious weeks and, although I had two Florestan sleeves finished, I was now less than a month from the deadline with no real hope of completeion.
Time for Plan B!
Fortunately, thanks to jumper one, I knew of a quick and great pattern. Thanks to my swatching, I knew of a reasonable-but-ever-so-slightly-felt-prone yarn that was definitely not out of stock. But no one wants the same jumper in two different yarns so it was time to work out a different cable!
With stitch dictionaries strewn everywhere and half-worked charts, I tried several variations. I have never been so conscious of the fact that every day I spent testing was a day I wouldn't have for knitting. In the end I settled on this (heavily modified from a couple of different sources)
I need to work it through again to decipher my own symbology but, in case anyone is curious, it shows right-side rows only, wrong side is worked as you'd expect maintaining the knit/purls of the previous row. Where there's a dot on a cable, purl that stitch rather than knit it. I will try to work out the detail though as I was really pleased with the result.
Obviously the resultant jumper wasn't as nice as the first version simply because the yarn wasn't as good. However, my tension was better and it's hard not to have pride in seeing my own cables come out so well. Thank goodness for out of stock yarn, otherwise I would have been stuck with the disappointing Florestan.
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