Knit a Jumper with Shetland Style

As I sat down to write about the Soorik pattern from Gudrun Johnston, the word “jumper” sprang to mind, though I doubt the designer would call this little dress a jumper. Where they live a jumper is no doubt what I would call a sweater in the States, but I don’t know what a more correct word for this design would be. I guess dress would work!

Whatever you want to call it, it’s a lovely little design with classic Shetland colorwork motifs on the bodice front and back as well as on the patch pockets. It calls for fingering weight yarn in five colors and is worked in one piece from the bottom up. It’s worked completely in the round so you will have some steeks to contend with, but that just adds to the fun.

It comes in eight sizes, and measures from the under bust ranging from 32.25 to 58.25 inches, or 82 to 148 cm. It’s designed to have 2 to 4 inches (5-10 cm) of positive ease in that area.

This looks like a lovely everyday dress to wear over leggings and a long-sleeved shirt when it’s cold out, or over a flowy lightweight shirt in the summer.

What’s really cool about this pattern (which is available on Ravelry) is that it’s part of Gudrun’s collection of patterns from The Shetland Trader, her mother’s made-to-order knitwear business. This pattern is part of her third collection from The Shetland Trader; this one has 11 patterns inspired by garments her mother made in the 1970s. (You can see all the patterns on Ravelry.)

You can purchase the individual patterns or the full digital ebook on Ravelry or buy a print book from pompom magazine. (They are winding down production this year so I don’t know how long printed books will be available.)

I love the idea of knitting these patterns that preserve the history of knitting in Gudrun’s family and in Shetland more generally, and this is just one of a series of collections she’s done, so if you like the idea you should check out her other collections, too.

[Photo: Ali Denney]

Knit a Dress without Knitting a Swatch

Knit Your Own Little Black Dress (Or Whatever Color You Want)

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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