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.
