Tag: cows

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.