Shop Samples

Oh NO!

I agreed to create a pattern for a shop sample, but got carried away and didn't think ahead about how easy it would be to explain to people how to do this.

Kathy at Colonial Yarn Shop said that she has not sold a single skein of Noro Cashmere Island and asked if I could come up with a pattern that could help move the yarn. This summer I created a pattern for a summer tank that was half crochet and half knit. The customers loved it. My class for that pattern was full and Kathy sold loads and loads of the yarn used for that tank (Blue Heron Metallic Rayon, and Blue Heron Ribbon). It looked fabulous hanging in the shop even though I wasn't 100% happy with it. I was sloppy in matching the crochet gauge with the knitting gauge. I suffered knitting and crocheting that project. The yarn tangled at one point and it took me a full 8 hours to untangle it. PLus writting the pattern for sizes other than myself took me hours. I should have learned from that experience never to volunteer to knit a sample AND make up a pattern AND use a difficult yarn.

So my idea was that the Cashmere Island was too expensive for most customers to consider using it for a garment. The next thought was that a hat, or scarf might make people just think of using the cheaper alternative to Cashmere Island - which is Kureyon or Silk Garden.

Basically this is a top down raglan (used Sweater Wizard to come up with a pattern). The rules for using the two yarns (Noro Cashmere Island and Jo Sharp Alpaca Kid LUstre) are as follows.

1.Every time you change yarns do a *slip 1 wyf, knit1* for the first row, but make sure that the slip 1 does NOT line up with the last time you did a slip 1.

2.Never change yarns on an increase row.

Sounds easy enough, yes? This pattern has become complicated becuase

1. With the raglan increases sometimes you can just start with a slip stitch and sometimes you need to start with a knit 1 when you change colors.
2. THe slip stitch compresses the pattern and changes the row count and therefore changes the rate of increases for the raglan shaping.
3. I didn't plan when to change colors and just made it up as I went along.

It isn't hard to knit. JUst hard to explain.

I enjoy knitting with this yarn. If I were knitting this for myself I'd be happy with how it is turning out. If I had to tell an advanced knitter how to do something similar - but not exactly the same I'd be o.k. But I'm really scared of having to tell a beginning knitter how to copy the sweater exactly.

I should have decided on a stripe pattern before I started.