Branches & Buds Pullover & Hat

Technically, my Branches & Buds pullover is a branches only version as I haven’t actually embroidered the buds onto the branches on the yoke.

Initially, I thought I’d wear the sweater without them and see what I thought. The jury is still out about adding the French Knot buds. I like the subtlety of no buds. Although, I think the buds add a lovely additional detail to the finished pullover.

The Branches & Buds Pullover was published in Making Magazine No 1 Flora. The pattern is designed by Carrie Bostick Hoge. I normally buy my copy of this magazine from Ysolda.com who is based in Scotland. The individual pattern is also available on Ravelry.com.

The Making Magazine is a proponent of the slowing down way of living. I’ll let Carrie Bostick Hoge the Editor explain the magazine’s ethos.

“In a world that is moving so fast, Making is an attempt to slow things down with thoughtful handwork. Whether our intention is to create something functional or purely to beautify our home environment, it is the act of making that helps us connect to ourselves, to the community around us, and often to the natural world. These connections bring added value to what we make.” Carrie Bostick Hoge

Making Magazine is not just a knitting magazine but alongside the knitting patterns there are articles and patterns for embroidery, sewing and quilting, interspersed with recipes and other creative endeavours.

Using the specified needle size I obtained the correct tension on the stitch count of 24 stitches/10cm(4″). I was a little off on the row count as I had 32 rows/10cm(4″) instead of 34 rows. I decided that this was workable as I could knit a few extra rows and intended to lengthen the sleeves and the body anyway.

I often have a problem obtaining the correct tension. Partly, because my tension tends to change depending on my mood, how much my carpet tunnel is playing up, as well as, they type of needles I’m using. But the main reason I think obtaining the required gauge can be an issue for me is that I’m normally not using the specified yarn in the pattern. If it is a US pattern often the specified yarn is not easily obtained in the UK.

For my Branches & Buds Pullover I decided to use the WYS Aire Valley Essential DK. This yarn is modestly priced at £4.49/100g. I have a great selection of colours available in the Yarn Shop. The yarn has a similar blend to sock yarn with 75% wool and 25% nylon, making for a nice hard wearing, easy care machine washable yarn. This is exactly what I wanted, a warm, hard wearing sweater for wearing when out walking with Bene. I used 600g of Taupe 604 for the main colour and 100g of Cloud 601 for the contrasting colour.

I haven’t discussed choosing the colours for my sweater in this post. I discuss my colour inspiration in detail in my post Shetland Colour Story – Branches & Buds Pullover.

The Branches & Buds Pullover is a top down sweater (which I have discovered is one of my favourite sweater construction methods). So, after knitting the colour work yoke, I divided for the sleeves and body, placing the sleeve stitches onto some waste yarn.

All was progressing well with the sweater. I’d just cast off the body section after completing 6.25 cm (2 1/2″) of 2×2 rib. Then I counted the stitches for the first sleeve as I put them onto the double pointed needles. Yikes… when I was putting the stitches onto the waste yarn, I hadn’t counted correctly. I now realised where the extra 10 stitches in the body count had come from. I counted the stitches on the other sleeve. It was correct. So I had a discrepancy of 10 stitches between the 2 sleeves.

I set the sweater aside, as you do in these situations, and went to bed. I’ve always found it a good idea to sleep on a problem before making any rash decisions!

The next morning I thought to myself that knitted fabric can be very forgiving! So I decided to fudge the sleeves. I increased the stitch count evenly by 5 stitches on the sleeve with not enough stitches and evenly decreased by 5 stitches on the sleeve with the correct stitch count.

I also picked up a few extra stitches under the arm to close up the little gap. This meant that my final sleeve stitch count was only 1 stitch shy of what it should have been.

I knitted my sleeves slightly longer and finished with 6.25cm (2 1/2″) of 2×2 rib for the cuff.

Of course, I didn’t know if the sleeves would look and feel okay until I had them finished.

When I tried the finished Branches & Buds Pullover on, I was pleased with how the sleeves had turned out. I don’t even notice the mistake and nobody else has noticed either. I was also glad of the extra 10 stitches as I like the looser feel of the sweater across my tummy area, although it is maybe a little too loose across my back!

I’m really cross with myself that I didn’t take the time to count the stitches on the sleeves and the back and front sections before starting to knit the body section. It made what was otherwise a very enjoyable knitting project more stressful than it needed to be.

Hat

I decided to use my leftover yarn from the project to knit a co-ordinating hat as I didn’t have a hat that looked perfect with my new sweater. (Am I getting a bit too matchy-matchy with this?) I do love using leftover yarn from a project whenever possible.

I swapped the main colour and contrast colours around for the hat. Mainly because I had more of the Cloud 601 than I had of the Taupe 604 and I didn’t want to break into an additional ball of the Taupe. So the Taupe was used for the contrasting stripes set against the backdrop of the lovely soft aqua coloured Cloud. I also simplified it by opting for 2 stripes rather than using the yoke pattern. I did use the same 2×2 rib with garter stitch rows for the brim.

I added a large grey faux fur pompom on the top of the hat. I used a large button so that the pompom can easily be removed when I want to wash the hat. I find that my light coloured hats tend to get grubby (from makeup) and need to be washed relatively frequently.

I bought my beautiful grey hand made pompom from an excellent seller on Etsy – AchillesOriginalArt. I couldn’t have been more pleased with the service or the pompoms that I chose. The order arrived very quickly from Prague in the Czech Republic.

The pompoms do wash well although they take longer to dry than the hat. The long faux fur can be fluffed up successfully using the hair dryer while it is still damp.

There is a great video on VeryPink.com showing how to do this if you aren’t aware of the method. The technique comes from garment making as quality coats will often have a small plain button on the inside to stop the decorative button on the front of the coat from pulling through the fabric when it is in use. It was a technique I used when I was making the Sasha sized duffle coats for sewing on the toggles. I threaded two pieces of sturdy cotton yarn through the bottom part of my pompom. Then brought them through the top of the hat where I wanted the pompom. Each end of the cotton yarn was threaded through the corresponding hole of the large button. Then I tied them together securely but in a way that could easily be released later. I used a double bow like I do on shoes with slippery laces.

Another method I’ve seen is to sew one half of a large press stud to the faux fur pompom and the other half of the press stud to the top of the hat. Personally, I didn’t find trying to sew the press stud to the pompom a particularly easy thing to do! The button method is definitely the easier one.

I’ll let you into a secret… I have a glorious collection of faux fur pompoms… that seem to breed at the rate of a Tribble. If you don’t know what a Tribble is watch ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ from the second season of the Original Star Trek Series which is available at the moment on Netflix. Even if you don’t like Star Trek (I’ve been a fan since I was 4 years old) this is a hilarious episode.