Ice Cream Dreams

Part of my never-ending quest to get my stash to actually fit into the four boxes it’s supposed to.

I’ve had a stash of multicoloured acrylic yarn lying around for years; so long I can barely remember the project I bought it for. A couple of years back I realised that some of the colours went together surprisingly well and made some pompoms out of them, as part of my quest to spark more joy.

But I still had a lot of it left, and it was taking up (proportionally speaking) a lot more space than I’d like it to. So I needed to use it up.

Somehow in my internet travels I came across Blake by Rachel Brockman and I thought, bingo. This is just what I’m after. I can use up those nice warm colours in a fun stripy cardigan.

I cast on, and I got started, and almost immediately decided that the pattern wasn’t quite right. Looking a bit harder at the picture (and reading ahead) I realised that the cardigan would be entirely shapeless, as it’s effectively just knit straight up to the shoulders, resulting in a square with a bit a gap at the front.

That’s not really my thing, so I decided to hack the pattern a little. Enter my old favourite, the Fisherman’s Rib jumper. That pattern is coincidentally in the same stitch pattern, but has a raglan shoulder that I already know fits in a comfy but slightly more shaped way, so I figured I could just frankenstein that in. It was going to be a bit complex as the jumper is knit in separate pieces and seamed together, while Blake is all in one piece; but I’d already cast on the Blake body by this point and didn’t fancy starting over. So I figured I could just get to the underarms with the main body, knit the sleeves to the same level, then just… smoosh them all together.

(That’s the technical term.)

And that did actually work. The trickiest bit was working out how to decrease for the V-neck. I ended up decreasing evenly from the bust point to the very last stitch of the raglan which is almost right; but I think possibly it could have done with a bit more left on the front as this is a bit wide and slips off the shoulder at the merest movement. Not that I’m averse to an off-the-shoulder number, it’s just not quite what I was after with this.

However, that’s just a minor quibble. Otherwise, it does exactly what I wanted. It’s bright, cheerful, and makes me think of summer; days spent outside in my garden, the smell of grass and suntan lotion, the sound of birds and summer party music drifting across the neighbouring gardens. I’ll put it on and bring a bit of brightness and joy into my day as we head into these gloomy, cold months of winter.