Horace?... Mind if I take this? I do love knitting patterns

This might be one of the most anachronistic garments I've ever posted. Wooly sweaters! In april! But honestly, I'm quite proud of how these turned out and I finally got the chance to take decent pictures, so to hell with such a silly thing as the weather. I knitted two sweaters!

Ah, our family. Me, the boyfriend, and a hairy old baby.

I bought yarn for a traditional lopi sweater when I was in Iceland last year, but only got around to the serious knitting in October or so. Once I started it got me into a sort of knitting kick, so I bravely promised my boyfriend I'd make him one for Christmas! (whilst still not making my dad a hat).

Both patterns came from a book I picked up in Iceland as well, aptly called 'knitting with Icelandic wool'. The pattern for my sweater is available for free here! The men's sweater pattern I used is called Riddari and the model doesn't seem to like woolen garments:

He looks angrier and angrier as the book progresses. It's hilarious.

I had never knitted a sweater before and found this kind a very nice way to start. You basically knit the body from the hem up to the armpits in the round, do the same for the sleeves and join the whole thing in the round to make the shaped yoke. No huge seams to sew together at the end, just a few armpit stitches!

I had only very limited experience with colourwork, but I didn't really encounter any problems. The biggest challenge was to get the tension of my floats even on the DPN's when I was knitting the sleeves on the men's sweater, but that was just a small bit. keeping count of my increases in the sleeves required the most attention, the rest was just easy breezy stocking stitch all the way.

I didn't want to make our sweaters too matchy matchy, although we do lean towards the same colours. They are both blue with red and white accents, but I went for different shades. The Aftur sweater has a more delicate yoke pattern so I went from a dark blue to a very dark grey and added shades of red, white and mustard yellow. I chose a faded blue for his sweater, paired it with heathered black and white and added a darker red for a bright accent.

I got all my additional yarn here (I really wasn't expecting to knit two sweaters!). Both of these sweaters were knit in Lett Lopi, which is a bit scratchy but behaves really well! Colourwork might be one of my favourite knitting techniques: it's not that hard to get the hang of and the results look really impressive. I've been working on and off on a cabled scarf for a while, but that's a sloooow project (as in, I'm taking my time). After that, I have some Brooklyn Tweed patterns lined up!

So, hooray for knitting and thanks to the boyfriend for doing this photo shoot thing! Most of the props were his idea, actually. Although it does paint a pretty clear picture of what our living room looks like.