Category: project – Bombolo

We had a nice sunny weekend and I finally got the pictures taken of Bombolo.  Since it continues cold, I also wore the sweater on Saturday and it was indeed warm and snugly and fun:  a success:

Yarn:  Austermann Bombolo
Pattern:  Austermann STrickTrends Fall/Winter 2004/2005 sweater # 6
Alterations:  I lengthened the sweater by 2 inches above the waist.  As you can tell, it was necessary.

Final Opinion:  This sweater was lots of fun to knit.  I bought the pattern because I saw it at Elann with the yarn.  It was a whim but I am happy to have purchased it because there are several other things in the book I would like to knit.  The yarn was easy to work with  and it was inexpensive, which I felt was a good idea with  a sweater that seemed more trendy than classic.  I love the pattern but I wasn’t sure how long the attraction would last.    Having finished the sweater and worn it, I still love it, so it is a success.  The overall sweater is not of the quality as some of my more recent past projects, and that is due to the yarn.  It is an interesting yarn, it is not a quality yarn. 

That is OK.  Sweater’s don’t last forever, styles change, and sometimes a quick fun project is the perfect thing.  This sweater will get lots of wear.

I took a few close-up photos on Matilda:

Side view:

and a front view.  I couldn’t get an even half-way clean picture of this so I attempted cutting the sweater out of the background and posting it on a solid background.  Obviously I need practice, but I also need to find a good photo-taking spot, which is not easy at my place, and to work on improving the quality of my pictures:

My only complaint concerning this sweater is that the v-neckline is not as low as it seems to be on the model in the magazine.  Now I admit to some culpability here, as I altered the pattern, but I did not check the length of the neckline to see if the way it was written was actually a flattering length on me.  Ends up it is not.  I need a deeper v, one that goes further down the chest. and therefore, as I was already covered up more than enough, finding a flattering way to place the little neckline drape piece was awkward and took some time.    This might yet change.

Although many many things have been going on in this murmuring household, knitting has not really been among them.  I did finish the front of Bombolo on Friday but didn’t even manage to get it on the blocking board until late this afternoon, in not the most photogenic of lighting situations. 

I did spend some time wondering if it was even worth blocking, the yarn is almost half acrylic and there is really no point to blocking acrylic yarn, but I decided that, since the greater half was wool, a little blocking  probably couldn’t hurt things, and it seems like it was a good idea just to help square things up a little bit.

I really love the shape and look of this piece of knitting and am very much looking forward to getting this put together so I can wear it.  Now that winter is finally here, even with a dearth of snow, it is perfect warm snuggly sweater weather.

Here is the back.  Notice the shaping is somewhat different.

I started on the sleeves last night but I only the got the first couple of rows done before I realized I would need to rechart them, not because there was anything wrong with the charts, or because I made any corrections or changes, but just because the charts in the book were a little small to look at conveniently while watching television.

The other advantage of reproducing the chart is the convenience of flipping the pattern to make the second sleeve a mirror image of the first, without having to remember to reverse the pattern while I am knitting. 

After literally ripping through the back of the Bombolo sweater, I suddenly shifted into slow gear and have made little progress since.

Here is the completed back, completed Thursday night or Friday morning early (already I forget, it seems like such distant history.)

I really didn’t pick up my knitting again until Sunday on the train into NYC.  It is an ambitious train project, large needles, thick bulky yarn, and a chart to work from, usually I go for something which occupies less space.  Nonetheless I thought I was progressing well, and then I discovered a mistake that was just too much of a pain to drop down and fix (I had forgotten an increase 6 rows below, in the middle of a row no less) so I ripped and worked my way back up.  I got a little further and discovered that I had left a row out of my chart, combining a right side and a wrong side row,  I managed to figure that out, recalculating the stitches in my head, but I realized that the chart was going to be off by one row in terms of the repeats of one of the 4 patterns.  It is immanently possible to do this kind of thing in one’s head of course, but perhaps not on a return train trip after a day in the city.  Once we were on the train home, in a car filled with a class of high school students who provided plenty of loud distractions, I decided that it was best to let the knitting go for a while.  Besides, I discovered yet another error, this time only two rows down, and thought there are times when it is best to call it quits.

I always have a book in hand as well on the train, and I settled down to read Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly, one of the few Conrad novels I have not previously read.

Monday night I fixed the chart, adding a new row at row 31, decided I didn’t like the way one part of the pattern looked, ripped the knitting back to about row 20, changed the way I was doing one of the decreases on the chart, and started over. 

If I added up all the times I have re-knit rows 20 – 30, I might have finished the front of the sweater by now.

This time it seems to have finally taken:

A sunny day might be nice, for a sharper less fuzzy picture, but at the rate I am going, I might be done with the front by the time I have sunshine in the house again.

Some time back, Elann  had some Austermann Bombola on sale and they showed a rather intriguing pattern for a cabled pullover with the yarn.  I was intrigued, but I didn’t succumb.  Still, I kept coming back — a bad sign as well you all know.

Then, just as I had almost forgotten the temptation, Liana posted that she had made that same pullover and also commented on how much she liked the patterns in the Austermann book.  My fate was sealed.  I ordered the yarn and the book, even though I was not fully convinced that it would look as good on me as on Liana.   I can’t seem to escape that urge to copy everything that inspires me.

I started the project yesterday.  Well, actually yesterday I recharted the project because I need to lengthen the sweater a bit to accommodate my taller, longer-waisted frame.  It is fortunate that this pattern is knitted on such bulky needles (12 mm) that I only needed to add 4 rows to the pattern, but even that required a little adjustment in the patterns to make sure that all the cables ended up in the proper place with the addition of the new rows.    Now for years I did this by hand, with reams of graph paper, and often, if I made mistake much swearing and cursing.  I would dread regraphing things, not that they were all that difficult, but they were enormous time drains.  But computers make things much easier, and although it took some time to enter the charts into the computer, and alter the cables to accommodate the new rows, I pretty much redid the charts in a couple of available hours on Tuesday.

This morning I got up and instead of doing the various things I usually do early in the morning before my beloved gets up, I curled up in my chair and started knitting.  At 6 1/2 stitches to 4 inches, it goes fast, but not as fast as one might think.  I still find a 12 mm needle much harder to hold in the hand and much more tiring to work with than a finer needle, 4.5 mm or smaller let’s say.  Even the tiny sock needles are easier on my fingers than the big bulky ones.

Despite that complaint, my morning knitting and an afternoon knitting break when I returned from a perhaps ill-advised trip to the gym and a pretty intense workout left me exhausted with a return to full-sinus distress, yielded pretty impressive results:

I’m a bit more than half-way through the back of the sweater.  At first, I wasn’t sure what I thought, but the more I see, the more I like the sweater.  It will be warm, fuzzy, fast, inexpensive, and very, very pink.  What is there not to love in that combination?  Well, once I would have said I am not a pink kind of girl, but obviously that is not true.  It looks like it will be fun and funky too, the perfect thing for a winter’s day and a pair of jeans.