As I worked deeper into the yoke towards where I would need to separate out the sleeves, I began to get a little nervous about my calculations.
I wondered if I’d made an error in measuring the cow and was still struggling to conceptualize how the armholes needed to be.
I did find a website that talked about how the Scottish knitter made Shetland sweaters for Shetland ponies a bunch of years ago, but it wasn’t detailed enough to be helpful.
I kept searching. I figured a dog was more alike in shape to a cow than a person was and found this amazing website where an incredible knitter adjusted a human round yoked sweater for her dogs!
This was the ticket! I re-measured AGAIN and did a bit more math to settle on this:
As you can see, the openings for the sleeves are much closer to the front of the body than in making a person shaped sweater.
Here we are: 12 days in and almost at sleeve separation. I threaded a long line of waste yarn through the live stitches so I could do another fitting.
Fortunately, the floats are slack enough that I was able to slip the yoke over the cow’s head, ears, and antlers to do a fit check.
Since none of this project is “off the shelf,” I needed to make sure my calculations actually worked on the cow.
(Yeah, no pattern for sweaters for cows in Ravelry. They should rectify that!)
So far, so good.
The next big challenge is going to be separating out the front leg stitches from the yoke. I’m a little nervous about it, but ultimately, knitted fabrics do have some give, so it should be okay.
2nd motif is done
Now a row of apples has joined the chickens.
One more increase row and one more motif until shoulder separation.
Yesterday began with a neighbor dropping off a few skeins of wool in natural colors that she had been given and that had been spun by someone in a neighboring town.
I’m looking forward to incorporating it into the sweater!
I didn’t have a lot of knitting time yesterday because Thursdays are my days at the community pottery studio where I’m the glaze making tech. But I knew I could make up for it today, as we had a longish car ride.
The dreaded mistake to be frogged back
And I was knitting away when I realized I’d made an error. 2 rows back. Sigh.
Frogging work is always annoying, but not ripping out mistakes is even worse. Even though my cow wouldn’t notice, I would.
First motif complete! Chickens!
Luckily, there was a Red Sox game tonight because I do some of my best knitting during games. The Red Sox may have lost in a blowout, but I now have 8 inches of the cow sweater completed!
Tomorrow, I do another yoke increase and start motif number two.
My strengths do not lie in the visual/spatial area. I suspect much of that is because I have aphantasia – the lack of a visual mind’s eye. But what I lack in visualization skills I more than make up with kinesthetic and tactile acuity.
Which is why I spent a bit of time over coffee this morning actually making a paper model of my cow’s sweater before progressing to the yoke.
Holding the paper model up to the cow
This helped me understand the differences in construction between the shape of a person’s sweater and the one I need to make for my cow. It’s not just a matter of size, but of structure.
Then I was able to plan out the yoke, placing increases in plain rows between 3 motifs.
I started with some yellow chickens. (Hat tip to The Pacific Knit, Co. for the collection of farm motifs. I think I’ve purchased at least 4 or 5 of the collections.)
Chickens in progress
I added another 3″ to the 4″ of ribbing. If I can average an inch of knitting a day, I’ll have the sweater done well in time for the deadline of June 10.
So now that I have my cow and my yarn (and an all important deadline), I need to start the project.
But it’s not as if you can go on Ravelry and search for a sweater pattern fit for a cow. I actually need to do quite a bit of math and measuring.
One of the first things to measure is gauge: how many stitches and rows per inch for a given yarn thickness and needle size. When I told fellow knitters about this project, after they stopped laughing, they recommended I use really large needles so the knitting would go faster. While each yarn does have a recommended needle size, you can push it a little. So I tried knitting with size 11 (8 mm needles) and got a 2.5 stitches per inch gauge, but the needles were awkward to hold.
I went down to 10.5 (6.5 mm needles) and while the gauge went up to 3 stitches per inch, they were much more comfortable to hold and knit with.
It will mean more stitches to knit in total, but if I can knit faster and with greater ease on slightly smaller needles, it will be worth it.
Spending some quality time with my cow
The next thing to measure was the cow itself. When I’m creating a sweater for a person, it’s a lot simpler to take a few key measurements and plug them in to a basic pattern/recipe. (Shout-out to Tin Can Knits and their Strange Brew recipe!)
It’s not quite that straightforward for a cow. The main issue is the front legs aren’t arranged at opposite ends of the torso like in people. So I did a ton of measuring and sketched several views of the cow with relevant numbers.
I am not that kind of artist. There’s a reason I’m *knitting* here!
Armed with these numbers and the knowledge from knitting many, many sweaters in the round, I started to notate the pattern for my cow.
The neck ribbing is complete. Now to start the yoke and colorwork.
I cast on 130 stitches + 3 for the steek and started the neck ribbing. While I usually do lopapeysas bottom up, I’m working this one top down, so in case I run out of time, I can just make the sweater a bit more cropped.
Sometime last month, I saw a call for artists to submit an application to participate in Old Sturbridge Village‘s Cow Parade.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a fascination with cows. I really can’t tell you why this long-time city dweller loves cows, but I do. They have a calm presence and energy that draws me. I still can’t drive by a herd without mooing out the window. What can I say? I’m easily amused. (amoosed?)
And while I’m not a painterly kind of artist, I am a skilled knitter and I thought, why not knit a sweater for a cow?
Neil makes a new friend
When we were in Iceland in 2023, we saw this statue of a pig wearing a lopapeysa (Icelandic stranded sweater) so I knew it could be done.
But this time of year is very busy and pressured for us as we have to get all the fruit trees pruned and get all of our garden beds planted. Not to mention planning for the Hardwick Fair.
Still, every time I thought of a cow in a sweater, I laughed. And it’s one thing I know: whimsy and happiness are in far too short supply.
So, with Neil not only not talking me out of it, but actively enabling me, I sent in my application, never dreaming my project “Yarning for the Past” would be selected.
Oops. It was.
I did a bunch of loose calculations and on friday I ordered 32 skeins of alafoss lopi yarn from Iceland.
The box of yarn and my cow both arrived today.
32 skeins = 3,200 yards = 1.8 MILES of yarn
I spent some time today measuring my cow and coming up with my plan of attack.
The growing season in Central Massachusetts is absurdly short. The night temperatures were dropping into the 30’s (farenheit) until a week ago. The past few days have been perfect blue-sky days full of sunshine and warmth.
Which means we’ve been busy in the dirt.
Last year we devoted a few rows in our main garden area to straw bale gardening – in which you prepare the bales for planting with applications of fertilizer and water for about 10 days.
Last year’s results were a bit disappointing. Partly because we hadn’t done the best job in preparing the bales, partly because the drought stressed everything we planted. We’re trying it again this year, armed with more knowledge and experience.
The advantages of the straw bale method include having the plants higher up – easier for the farmer’s back, weed control, and better control of the growing environment, especially if the soil is less than optimal.
We also started planting our potatoes, corn, and winter squash. It always feels like a race against the coming winter, given how long these take to maturity.
It’s definitely a frenzy of planting right now, but once everything is in the ground and the watering is set up with their timers, the day to day work of weeding isn’t too onerous.
We’ve already been enjoying the fresh asparagus. I need to harvest the rhubarb (I’m planning on doing a country wine with rhubarb and some fruit I have left over from last year in the chest freezer). Soon we will have fresh peas and leafy greens.
I doubt there’s a single place on our 54 acres where if you dig, you don’t find rocks. That’s the real reason New England is synonymous with stone walls. Robert Frost certainly knew that…
We have built many walls on our property from rocks dug out during the excavation for our house addition and have added to them from working in the gardens.
Setting the 3 bare-root apple saplings in a common hole
Months ago, I ordered 3 different but pollinating-compatible apple trees: Roxbury Russet,Sundance, and Galarina. Why these? I have been curious about the Roxbury Russet and started my research with it in mind. It’s thought to be the oldest named apple variety in the US and was discovered in Roxbury MA. It’s a disease resistant apple and a good storage apple. The other two are newer varieties, but will cross pollinate with the Russet. They are both the kind of apples we love – sweet and crisp, and they are all good storage varieties and have some natural disease/pest resistance.
My apple trees after the first pruning and with their tender trunks protected.
Because the fruit trees that were already on the property when we bought it were overgrown and difficult to prune down to human scale, I was determined to start these trees right. I am using the guidance in Ann Ralph’s book “Grow a Little Fruit Tree”.
That meant making a nearly heartbreaking prune to take all the whips down to knee high.
This cherry looked a lot happier after a long drink of water
My spouse bought this cherry tree from our local ag co-op. It was already in a 5 gallon container and scaffolded out. I was a little worried that I’d have to prune it harshly to get it started, but it had been well pruned initially. All I have to do now is to thin out branches that will shade others and do some shortening cuts of limbs.
An Aronia – or chokeberry
This aronia bush has been sitting in its 1 gallon plastic pot out in our back garden, essentially being neglected for 3 seasons. I honestly thought it had died over the winter, but then it began to leaf out. Anything that determined to thrive gets a spot in my orchard. Because it’s a bush and not a tree, I’ll prune to keep it from getting scraggly, but that’s all.
The old, scraggly apple tree I couldn’t bear to cut down
Planting an orchard is a leap of faith and a gift for our future. It will be years before any of the trees I planted today bear fruit.
In the meanwhile, this old, gnarled apple tree continues to bear little crisp and slightly sour, misshapen apples that we primarily let the deer enjoy.
According to an old proverb, the best time to plant a fruit tree is 10 years ago. The second best time is today.
So these three varieties – Roxbury Russet, Galarina, and Sundance, along with a peach I grafted last year, a cherry tree we bought at the Hardwick Co-op and an aronia bush cutting will be planted soon in a small orchard area we created last year.
Our orchard plan
We have a 40′ by 50′ space that has an existing old apple tree and some large rocks. (Hey, it’s New England, there are always rocks.)
While this may feel crowded for the number of trees we’re planning, the method I’ll be following is to keep the trees small with judicious pruning both in early spring and at the summer solstice. According to Ann Ralph in her book “Grow a Little Fruit Tree” Early spring pruning sets the architecture of the tree. Mid summer pruning controls size.
I’m hopeful this will keep our trees at human and homesteader scale, giving us enough fruit but not too much to handle.
