I’ve been in a stash-reducing mood lately. I had a bunch of Rowan Felted Tweed DK sitting around for a pattern I decided not to make after all. What to do? Through the magic of Ravelry, I found the perfect use for all that yarn – Storm Mountain by Heidi Kirrmaier.
The pattern is simple to make. Worked from the top down, it uses raglan shaping for the sleeves and eyelet increases to create the pretty back. Heidi uses ingenious stitch count tables to make it very easy to keep track of the repeats and number of stitches at each stage along the way.
As you can see, there are a couple of ways to wear the sweater; it can cascade down the front or be secured across. The open front was not so great outside in the winter snow, but will be just right in the spring!
Being a seriously pear-shaped person, I needed the top part of the sweater to be smaller than the bottom part. I made the following modifications:
First, I cast on using cable method for firmness. I made the top half, down to about 7.5” beyond the yoke, in smaller needle sizes (#3 and #4); this gave me a tighter gauge as well as less garment width. Then I switched to #5 which gave me the gauge as called for in the garment for the bottom part of the sweater. I worked one fewer pattern repeats in bottom half, since I got the called-for length.
I struggled with the SSE as described in the pattern; clearly I was doing something wrong. I chose instead to do: RS first 4 sts: ktbl, p1, sl1,p1 RS last 4 sts: p1, sl1, p1, slwyibWS first 4 sts: p, k, p, k WS last 4 sts: k, p, k, slwyif
I found the sweater easy enough for tv-watching and social knitting, with just enough going on to also keep it interesting.
Many thanks to my husband Steve for braving the snow to take these lovely photos!
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