I’ve had the yarn to knit a new Bohus sweater for a long time, and I finally started it. My inspiration for doing so is The American Swedish Institute’s upcoming exhibition, Radiant Knits: The Bohus Tradition. I’ll be traveling to Minnesota (BRRRRRR) next week to visit Susan and go to the exhibit’s opening weekend.
The Bohus now on my needles is the Large Lace Collar, and I’m using one of the kits produced by Solveig Gustafsson. The directions for these authentic Swedish kits have you knit the yoke in the round, and then knit the back, front, and sleeves as flat pieces. I’ve chosen to rewrite the directions to knit the entire garment in the round because I love having the whole sweater finished when it comes off the needles.
As with my Blue Shimmer, I’m going to make some small changes to the design. I’ll do a different neck than the ribbing the pattern calls for. I’m not quite sure yet what that will be, so I started the sweater with a provisional cast on to keep my options open. I’ve just now finished the yoke, which is the slow but fun part. Here are some in progress photos:
As I was about to finish the yoke, I decided to rip back three rows in order to line the patterns up differently. At that point, I had 400+ stitches on my needle and I didn’t want to lose them. (I was on a size 2.5 mm.) So I pulled out the needle, and then used it to pick up the stitches in the row I needed to rip down to. Once the stitches were securely on the needle, I could rip out the rows above it without worrying about losing anything. In case you’ve never done that, here’s a picture of how it looked as I was picking the row up:
It’s a little fussy, but much faster than other ways of doing it. Now that I am in the all black portion of my sweater, I’ve gone down a needle size to a 2.25 mm. The reason for that is in my experience, I knit a little tighter when I’m stranding. If I didn’t change needle sizes now that the sweater is all one color, the knitting would look looser and the sweater might appear to “balloon out” from the yoke.
I’m trying NOT to think about the fact that I am knitting an entire sweater on the size needles I usually use for socks and gloves.
