My last Idea Log was about my obsession with Purl Soho’s new yarn, Linen Quill, and the sweaters I was dreaming of knitting from it. Since then, two things have happened:
- Before I had a chance to place an order, a box of skeins magically appeared on my desk. (Thank you, Purl!) And although I haven’t had a chance to swatch with it yet, it’s every bit as delicious as it looks in the photos.
- They published this pattern for their woven Field Scarf, which is so beautiful it makes me dizzy. That palette is just perfection.
However, I don’t weave and don’t have any plans to start. (No matter how desperately I want this scarf.) So what’s a knitter to do? Well, naturally I’m sitting at my laptop staring at these photos, imagining ways to knit a sweater that retains the spirit of this scarf.
The basis of the scarf is the three vertical bands — the warp is the ivory, then the ivory-grey marl, then the black, and they’re woven through with an ivory weft. The nearest simulation of that would be to knit with two strands of ivory, then one strand of ivory and one of the marl, then one strand of ivory and one of the black. It would be amazing to use intarsia to make those bands vertical on the sweater, but I’m not quite that clever. However, it would be simple to do it as horizontal bands. The trick is how to “weave” in the lilac and gold, especially perpendicular to the wide bands. So I’m thinking of vertical button bands where the persistent strand is the lilac instead of the ivory. And then how to get a bit of the gold in there? Maybe a thin stripe that’s gold and marl before switching to the ivory-black band? In which case it would be ivory-ivory, ivory-marl, gold-marl, ivory-black.
I also really love the starkness of the black fringe along one-third of each end, and think one marl cuff and one black cuff might have a similar effect.
It would be super fun to play with …
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PREVIOUSLY in Idea Log: Three sweaters haunting my thoughts
