Thursday, April 26, 2007

Introduction and swatch

Hi! I'm Laura and I'm new to this KAL. I'm making Morrigan and I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one trying it. I've swatched and cast-on. Okay, I cast-on three times, but now I'm progressing swimmingly. :-)

Here's a photo of the two swatches that I made.
Swatches.jpg

I contacted Jenna about sizing for the sweater and she sent me this information and gave me permission to share it with others:
A word of caution about ease: that bit you read in my blog was a
quotation from an e-mail I had sent to Amy early on, but that was from
the initial stages--I diverged from some of those ideas later on. Now
that I've seen the sweater on a live, moving body (thanks to YouTube--
if you look at the video embedded in Amy's blog right now
(http://knitty.com/blog) about 1:00 in, there she is), I don't think 4"
of ease is appropriate. I think it's better if it's a closer fit,
maybe 2", if that. (The model--can't recall who it was--was wearing a
shirt, probably relatively thin, underneath.) If you're choosing
between two sizes, I'd probably err towards the smaller one, provided
it didn't have negative ease.

Of more concern is the length. I'm 5'2" and have a bit of an ingrained
bias that way, plus I was banking on the sweater stretching a bit with
wear, despite the fact that Calmer is bouncy. But I don't think the
sample Morrigan has been worn enough by anybody for this to happen
yet! If you're concerned about length, it's easier to alter than the
width; you might want to use the instructions for the larger sizes
(can't remember which, haven't got the book in front of me) because its
length is longer, and use those instructions (so far as length goes)
with your size--you'll be working a longer repeat for the central cable
panel. You can also tweak the length a bit at the very hem, where the
garter stitch edging is.

4 comments:

Stitch-ay Woman said...

I wonder if Jenna would have any advice re sizing for someone who is already knitting the largest size AND wanted to make the sweater a little longer? Longer sweaters are a bit better for those of us with significant boobage.

Kate M said...

Thanks for posting this. I am hoping to tackle Morrigan at some point, but first I think I will tackle Bacardi. I did pick up a single ball of Calmer on the cheap to practice some swatches of pattern with.

Kristina B said...

Hi Laura:

I do hope you post photos as you get further along. I'm planning to make Morrigan (after all my experimenting, just bought some Calmer on line at quite a reasonable price). Also, you and I are about the same height (I'm 5'1") so I would be interested to know about finished fit. I'm planning to make the small size.

Karen Frisa said...

Just wanted to mention: if you're changing the length of Morrigan, your stitch counts probably won't match the pattern stitch counts after the front and back are divided. This is because some of the charts change their stitch counts from row to row (in particular chart X, which increases and decreases for the length of the sweater). The stitch counts in the pattern take this into account (which is why they seem odd at first blush), but if you divide for front and back on a different row, then your stitch counts will be different. Use markers between each chart and pay attention and you'll be OK. :)