I’ve been knitting test swatches of scale mail to figure out the ideal scale spacing for my lorica squamata, and I think I’ve figured it out
Of course this means I have to essentially knit a whole new sweater now
Knitting Scale Mail
Category: Knitting
The Newest Lopapeysa!
Welllp, I’ve finished another lopapeysa… just in time for summer, alas. I’ve still been wearing it out of obstinance because I don’t want to wait until next winter to wear it.
I followed Jenn Steingass’ “Dreyma” pattern and it is different from traditional Icelandic sweater patterns in a few ways: it is knitted from the top-to-bottom (instead of bottom-to-top like most Nordic sweaters) and it has short-row shaping for making the back longer, and decreases for the waist and increases for the hip – so it is more fitted than most traditional peysas, which are somewhat unisex. Also also it has an option for the rolled collar instead of the traditional ribbed collar.
I like the unisex sweater look with the ribbed collar, and of course I could have gone for that again, but I figured I have so many peysas with such a similar layout that I should make at least one different – just to mix it up.
Completed Pac-Man Peysa
At long last, I have finished knitting the Pac Man Peysa!
I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!
As you might recall, I told Doc that I would knit a sweater for him if he designed one. While the sweaters I had been knitting for myself were more traditional-looking Icelandic sweaters (lopapeysa), Doc of course designed a Pac-Man Peysa! He used http://knittingpatterns.is/ to do it, which is a super fun tool for designing Icelandic sweaters (although it is ancient and runs on Microsoft Silverlight)
Of course, the pattern had a lot of difficulties in it, since it was designed by somebody who had never knitted before (that is to say, Doc). I didn’t think about that, but it really made a difference to how things worked out. After I complained, Doc would make modifications based on my feedback and it would be much easier to implement.
I had initially thought that it was important to be super faithful to Doc’s design; but when I would bring up a part of the pattern that was not ideal for knitting, it would turn out that he didn’t even particularly want it that way – he just designed it like that because he didn’t know it would make it more difficult. So the pattern went through many many changes, and the final pattern is something we collaborated on.
It was still difficult in many ways, like having all the different color ghosts (instead of one color of ghost which would have been much easier), but that is something we weren’t willing to compromise. That’s almost the whole point of the sweater! And I’d say it was worth it.
If you want to download the pattern we generated from knittingpattern.is, it is here:
Note that the pattern doesn’t indicate the accurate number of stitches in the sleeve pattern, because it doesn’t show the increases. However the instructions do accurately say to increase every 6 rows. Use your judgement, and don’t do an increase in the middle of Pac-Man’s face or something, that sort of thing, and it will still work out fine.
Here’s some more photos of Doc wearing it:
And here are some of the in-progress photos to reminisce over:
