Category: Cow Parade

Day 38, #CowParade project

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.

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.

Day 27, The #CowParade Project

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?

Day 20, The #CowParade Project

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.

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.

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!

Day 12, The #CowParade Project

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.

It’s starting to look like a sweater!

Day 7, The #CowParade project

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.

Now a row of apples has joined the chickens.

One more increase row and one more motif until shoulder separation.

Stitch by stitch!

Day 6: The #CowParade Project

I added 12 more rows between yesterday and today – that’s 3 inches of knitting length.

A little less than I had been hoping for, but still on track for the project.

So far, I have about 12″ complete of the 40″ target length.

As the girth of the cow increases, the number of stitches per row also increases and each row will take longer to knit. 

And because I have colorwork motifs planned for the entire sweater, I won’t have many quick and easy rows of only one color.

I still have about 50 knitting days to the deadline, though I have to account for blocking, steeking, and adding button bands.

Wish me luck!!

Day 5, The #CowParade Project

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.

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.

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.

Day 3, the #CowParade project

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.

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.)

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.

Fingers crossed…

Day 2, The #CowParade Project

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.

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.

Armed with these numbers and the knowledge from knitting many, many sweaters in the round, I started to notate the pattern for my cow.

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.

Tomorrow, I’ll start the first motif.