Rogue is done.

Conveniently, I finished it the same day we bought a new camera! So we had a photo shoot out in the yard today. It was a rather high speed photo shoot since I finished the sweater about 5 minutes before we had to leave to have dinner with Jamie's family, but it definitely got the job done. Unfortunately this is a crappy time of year for outdoor photo shoots. It's muddy everywhere, especially in our alley, I was standing in a puddle, and the snow is all gross and brown. Oh well. The sweater's nice! (Ignore our kind of decrepit fence, too.)



I clearly need work on my "posing for pictures of knitted items without looking like a dork" skills.



I love the hood.



See above re: looking like a dork. And this is apparently not a good nose angle. I swear I actually have quite a small nose.







It is DONE! Hooray! I wore it to dinner tonight (with no coat! Hooray!) and got many compliments on it. As you can see from the photos, the fit is really good. The cables look awesome in this yarn. And it's all mine! This is officially the first sweater I have made for myself.

Here's the knitty gritty:

Pattern: Rogue. Possibly the most photographed pattern on the internet, and with good reason. This pattern is excellent. It is easy to follow, well written, and thorough. Two thumbs up! I knit it in the 48" size.

Yarn: Bartlett Fisherman's Two-Ply in Light Sheepy Grey. This yarn was great to work with. It's still very sheepy, so it smells nice and wooly. There was occasional bits of straw or whatever in the yarn, and it changed consistency a lot when I washed it. (And the water was quite nasty afterwards!) But it holds its stitches like a hot damn. If you want to learn how to cable without a cable needle (which is the only way I cable any more), this would be a great yarn to learn on. It takes some serious convincing for it to unravel. Great for cables. Very woolly, though. If you want soft, this isn't for you. But it's definitely going to be well used in the long Edmonton winters. I ordered ten skeins of this yarn from KPixie, but I only used seven of them. (I have no idea what to do with the other three.)

Needles: The hem facing was knit on size 3 KP Options, and the body on size 5 Denises.

Modifications: I added an extra repeat of rows 33-38 in Chart A to add a bit of length. I'm 5'10", and I like my sweaters reasonably long. It's a really good length, although I wish the pocket was about an inch higher. Other than that, I pretty much knit it as written, aside from a few minor mistakes here and there. This pattern doesn't need modifying!

Start Date: January 10, 2007
Finish Date: March 24, 2007 (I knit a lot of other things in between.)

What I learned on this project: Closed cables were a new thing for me, and I really like them. This is also the first time I've used short rows, but it won't be the last. I really, really like the fit of this sweater. Just the right amount of shaping. I also learned how to do three-needle bind-off, although I ripped it out in favour of grafting the hood. My seaming skills continue to improve, although they're still my weakest link and my least liked element of sweaters.

This makes sweater number for the year. Woohoo!

Expect lots of photos in the next little while. I need to learn to use the new camera before we go to Disneyland (in 10 days! Yippee!) and it's conveniently Flash your Stash next weekend. Plus my laptop has a built in drive for the SD card, so I can upload really easily. We got a Canon Powershot S3 IS, and it's really nice. Much fancier than the old one!

Labels: Rogue