In case you have a need to knit a sweater for a life-sized bovine, I’ve got you covered.
However, given that this was created for a FIBERGLASS cow, and not a real live one, I definitely need to add a disclaimer: dressing large animals is likely a dangerous endeavor and not something I recommend!
Last week (with a little help from our friends), we loaded the cow into the bed of our pickup truck and transported her back to Old Sturbridge Village and reunited her with the rest of the herd.
So now, we have actually transported livestock to and from Star Field Farm. (Can you refer to a fiberglass cow as livestock?)
You could say we are livestock adjacent…our over the hill neighbors’ cows occasionally come by for a visit.
It was surprisingly hard to say goodbye to my cow friend. After all, she filled our entire entry way for two months. And, although my hands were definitely weary by the end, they also feel surprisingly empty without such a massive project in them.
This was definitely the strangest project I’ve gotten myself involved with, and it, like all the other things I’ve done (open a physical therapy practice, write a novel, move to the country and start a farm), it started with a cavalier “how hard could it be?” … Only to realize too deep into the process to back out, oh, yes, this is hard.
But one of the lessons of tackling things like this is learning that we can do hard things. We can accomplish big (strange) projects.
I am grateful to Old Sturbridge Village for allowing me to be part of their Cow Parade and for giving my cow pride of place right inside the visitor’s center. (Doesn’t she look cozy in her stall?)
If you have a chance, do go to the Village and enjoy spending a day in the 19th century as you walk the grounds and visit with all the decorated (and some real) cows.
What’s next for me? Summer is busy at the farm, though now that everything is planted, weeded, and mulched, and the fruit trees are pruned, much of the work is in harvesting before things bolt.
We harvested and froze over 10 lbs of bok choi, just before the heat dome hit.
And my bff’s sweater is next on the crafting list. She was very patient while I set it aside for the cow.
This will feel positively dainty after working in lopi!
And now that the Cow Parade project is completed, I have no excuses for avoiding the novel in progress. It’s the sequel to Litany for a Broken World which came out in February and I’m just over the 1/3 mark.
Knitting a sweater for a life-sized cow in a 60 day timeframe was definitely easier than facing a blank page. So, I will remind myself that we can do hard things and get back to writing.
Thank you for following along in my journey “Yarning for the Past.” I hope it offered you a bit of whimsy in trying times.
Over the past few days, I finally finished knitting the second sleeve/leg for the cow sweater.
This morning, I gave it a good soak in the bathtub to relax all the stitches before blocking.
Yes, the sweater filled the entire bathtub.
Normally, I block work on foam boards on our dining room table. Bit this sweater was far to big to block anywhere in the house. Then I remembered that our swing converts to a flat bed. Voila!
No rain today! Yay!
After the sweater had mostly dried, I finished the button bands, sewed on the buttons, and wove in/tied off any ends. Then it was time to hope that the blocking and the fact the sweater was still damp meant I had enough give to slip it on the cow.
Because if I couldn’t get it to stretch enough, I was going to have to reinforce and cut one of the sleeves open and sew it on the cow.
Luckily, I had just enough give to get the sweater on the cow!
And here she is in all her glory: Paige Hardwick and “Yarning for the Past.”
She, along with 24 other decorated cows, will be on display at Old Sturbridge Village from June 21st 2025 through September.
Cow by the numbers:
59 days of knitting
One and a half MILES of yarn
5 pounds of yarn
Approximately 35,000 stitches
Icelandic lopi was used for most of the project, and
Homespun yarn from local sheep, plus
A little bit of the first roving I spun into bulky yarn using a drop spindle
Finally, buttons from my late father’s knitwear business from more than 40 years ago. I had exactly 10 left.
The deadline for getting my finished cow back to Old Sturbridge Village is fast approaching! I have a little under 2 weeks until June 10th.
Red barns – the final body motif
As of tonight, the sweater body is complete. I’ve also added the button bands and cut open the steek line to turn the tube into a cardigan.
I typically needle-felt along the steek before cutting, but I couldn’t find my needle felting kit. So I mustered up my courage and cut without any stabilizing first. Luckily, this is very sticky wool and it won’t unravel. Plus I picked up the button bands stitches which helps.
Sweater cut open and slipped on the cow for a fitting.
I don’t yet have the buttons sewn on, so the sweater is draping instead of snug against the cow’s belly.
See the gray yarn at the top and bottom edges? That’s locally spun wool from Hardwick sheep gifted to the project from some friends in town! I also actually have natural dyed wool spun from the sheep at Old Sturbridge Village that I’ll use on the sleeves.
Sharp-eyed readers may notice that the neck ribbing was originally green. I decided I liked the look of the natural yarn for all the ribbing so I threaded in a lifeline just below the neck band, cut the original band off, and redid the ribbing with the gray yarn.
Now for the sleeves, which will go quickly, as the circumference keeps decreasing as I knit down to the foot.
When I first learned how to knit – many decades ago as a child – knitting needles were long metal rods. If there were circular needles in 1970, I never saw them.
My grandmother’s best friend taught me first crochet, then knitting. What I didn’t realize until years later was that she taught me Continental style rather than the more typical (in the US at the time) English style. The difference between them is which hand you hold the yarn in. Continental is the same as crochet – yarn is held tensioned in the left hand and you scoop or pick it up with the right hand needle.
With English style, you hold the yarn in the right hand and throw it over the right needle.
Years ago, I taught myself how to do English style, so now when I knit colorwork, I hold one color in each hand and pick or throw that color as needed. I’ll try to get a video of what that looks like for the next update.
I haven’t knit with long metal needles in years. Even when knitting flat, (back and forth) it’s so much easier on the hands using circular needles. I love my interchangeable circulars. Multiple sizes of needle tips screw on to wires to make the length needed.
My interchangeable knitting needle kit
Which brings me back to the first photo and the ‘oops’. My cord broke while I was knitting and detached itself from the needle, pulling through a bunch of stitches.
Luckily, Icelandic wool is very ‘sticky’ and doesn’t easily unravel. I was able to get another cord and knit it all back. It was my favorite cord – marked along the length with inches and it didn’t twist. I think the weight of the sweater just did it in.
Almost to the bottom of the sweater! Blue tractors! Must be Ford.
I have a lovely row of sheep now. When I’m done blocking the entire project, I’ll go in an embroider over the eyes and around the head with the dark brown yarn to have those details pop. (You can see how it will look with the eyes of this sheep.)
Here is the view including the front leg holes, with a bonus of my new pup, Gigi. She approves of the sweater. I have about 14 inches of the body to complete and that means just 2 or 3 motifs before I get to the ribbing at the bottom. When I did my initial sketches for the proposal, I didn’t appreciate how large a gauge I would be knitting with – 3 stitches and 4 rows to the inch – which makes each motif larger than I had anticipated.
But now that I have the cow and can drape the work over it, I totally see how it needs the large motifs. Smaller designs would be lost, especially from a distance.
The next motifs will be barns and siloes, tractors, and pigs. They should finish all the available room on the sweater body.
For the sleeves, I need to choose narrower images – I’m thinking potentially wheat, shovels, and eggs. Any other suggestions?
You may have noticed that I’m posting less frequently now. That’s because as I get deeper into the project, the sweater increases in circumference along with the cow’s increasing girth.
Now it takes me approximately 30 minutes to finish a single row. Since it’s 4 full rows for an inch of length, that’s 2 hours of work per inch of sweater.
But I had anticipated that when I was planning the project out which is why I did as many rows as I could when the circumference was smaller. Now I’m about at the halfway mark for the sweater length. As you can see in the first photo, I’ve separated the yoke for the leg openings and placed those stitches on waste yarn. When I’m finished with the sweater body, I’ll return to the leg openings and knit them in the round from haunch to hoof.
I have to return the completed cow to Old Sturbridge Village by June 10th. My hard deadline to finish knitting is Jun 2nd, which will give me over a week to block, steek, weave in the ends, and add buttons. That’s a full 56 knitting days in total, and I’m already at day 20. So 36 days are left.
Working on the 4th motif – sheep!
I’m starting to wonder how I’m going to block this thing! It’ll be far too large to fit on my blocking mats. I suspect I’ll have to block it outside on our patio table. If it’s too big for that, then the barn floor.
Draping the sweater over the cow
Now that I’ve gotten the leg opening stitches on hold, I can no longer try the sweater on the cow. Not until I’m finished and cut the steek to make it a cardigan. But I’m confident with my measurements and math. Plus, pure wool allows a decent amount of wiggle room when I wet and position it during blocking.
If you have any questions about the project or my process, please ask!
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.
