Fashion: Yarn Style: November 2013

Houndstooth is everywhere and now I'm wearing it too! Yes, my houndstooth sweater is done! For once, I have managed to knit something on trend and actually finished it before it has gone out of style! This is a first!

I added a fair amount of waist shaping to the pattern and then I blocked it to stretch it out. There was 1 inch of positive ease. I love this sweater and I’m going to wear it a lot. The Anny Blatt instruction booklet was surprisingly easy to follow, and I liked their simple approach to this pattern. The sleeve cap came out too short so I had to lengthen it by 10 rows, but perhaps that is because I switched to using just the kidsilk haze for the sleeves. I felt that an allover magnified print would just be too much of a good thing! Also I made the armhole shorter by five rows to keep a closer fit to the body.

The name of this pattern is Dinky Pull. It is design #41 from Anny Blatt’s Collection Couture No 207. You can find the pattern here:

http://www.annyblatt.com/boutique/femme/9-pull/3713-dinky-pull/

I chose not to use the Anny Blatt yarns specified, because for one thing, shipping on Anny Blatt yarns to the U.S. seems to be 28 Euros! Wow!

Also in my temperate California climate, the idea of wearing dk weight angora yarn in both the body and sleeves of the pullover was too much. I plan to wear this sweater when I am hosting open houses on the weekend, and if I wore that much angora I would probably be dripping with perspiration which is not really my favorite work look. Instead, I combined one strand of Rowan’s angora haze with one strand of Rowan’s kidsilk haze to achieve the desired dk weight. I did this for both the black and the white to knit the houndstooth fair isle pattern. For the bottom ribbing, collar and cuffs, I doubled the black angora to get a fluffier look. The resulting fabric is light and incredibly soft. The sleeves knitted in just one single strand of kidsilk haze are nice and light and prevent the whole pullover from being too warm. It is very comfortable to wear, and I think I may be snuggling into it at home a lot when I feel like something warm and soft.

Remember this fabulous mink wrap by Michael Kors? It was my inspiration for knitting this pullover. Although my houndstooth piece is not as luxurious looking as the mink, the combination of the kidsilk haze and angora does feel quite a bit like fur, and I think the Anny Blatt houndstooth pattern has a similar fun quality. Something about magnified houndstooth is so retro and playful that it always makes me smile. And the price tag for the mink houndstooth wrap? $18,000. As you can imagine my sweater was a tiny fraction of that cost. And in my opinion, a V neck sweater is more multi-purpose than a wrap!

Now I have some black Angora Haze yarn leftover so I may have to knit up another fabulous design from Martin Storey’s Angora Haze booklet, which is totally retro inspired. My top pick: Brigitte:

I’m not sure about the lace pattern in the fuzzy angora. Up close the little eyelet holes in the fuzzy green yarn look a bit like moss. In black, I may just skip the lace and keep some of the beading. But not too much! I am playing around with swatches to experiment with beading on the angora. More on that next time!

I am anxious to finish my Dinky Pull sweater by Anny Blatt with the magnified hounds tooth pattern. Hounds tooth is everywhere! Even this pampered pup has his own sweater while I’m still toiling away on mine! What chagrin! Not that I can argue with the oddly appropriate spectacle of a hound wearing hounds tooth, but this is getting ridiculous!

You can find the above dog hounds tooth knitting pattern on the Vogue Magazine website.

At least I am almost finished with the front of my Dinky Pull:

Pictured above are the two pieces of my pullover, with the V neck front lying on top of the back piece; now that I look at it closely I realize it may be difficult to see the neck shaping of the front because I photographed it on top of the back.

Nevertheless, I love the V neck shaping in this pullover because whenever you are wearing a chunky knit with a big pattern like this it requires careful styling to ensure there is some sex appeal. The V both breaks up the bold pattern and gives it a little glamour. It will not be a deep V in the end because I will be using black angora trim and that will fill in the neckline a bit. However, I am skipping the bow you see in the original design:

To me, the bow makes this look a bit “lady” which is not the style I am going for. To further break up the pattern, I am thinking of knitting the sleeves in sheer black kidsilk haze with black angora cuffs. That way I do not have to worry about matching the print to the body of the sweater, plus it will keep the sweater from being so swelteringly warm (the angora is really a bit like wearing fur). I also think sheer sleeves will give the sweater a bit more sex appeal which is desirable. After all, this was never intended to be work-wear.

I think there is a kind of fabulousness that happens when one puts a sexy glamorous twist on a staple print, like hounds tooth. The French are the experts at this; check out the fabulous hounds tooth collage I found on the website of French vogue:

You can find it at this link:

http://en.vogue.fr/fashion/fashion-shopping/diaporama/houndstooth-shopping-tweed-check-scotland/14696

For me, the hounds tooth heels in this photo montage are the epitome of sexy chic! And how the French model manages to survive being swathed head to toe in that bulky wool and still look thin and cool is a true mystery to me.

For anyone who is interested in getting some support with your hounds tooth knitting, a knit-a-long for hounds tooth, plaid, tweed and checked knits is starting up in the Anthropologie group on Ravelry. Just look up the Anthropologie group and you’ll see the thread, “Hot right now: plaids and checks”. There is a crazy fabulous array of images of knitting patterns for checks, plaids and hounds tooth there.

I did receive some responses to my last post from readers who were really excited to knit hounds tooth but were seeking patterns more readily obtainable than the Anny Blatt knits I had posted, so here are some others that I believe you can buy as single patterns online:

#1: Passy by Mari Lynn Patrick. This was originally published in Verena Knitting, Fall 2010. Verena usually sells individual patterns online, you can find them here:

http://www.verenaknitting.com/

#2: Houndstooth Cowl in the current Vogue Knitting Fall/Winter 2013.

#3: Houndstooth cushion: This is a free pattern on the Rowan website. So for anyone who is just looking for the color chart, you could download this one and apply it to any sweater pattern in your queue.

http://www.knitrowan.com/designs-and-patterns/patterns/houndstooth-cushion

#4: The Houndstooth Cape in the current Vogue Knitting Fall/Winter 2013.:

#5: The Sexy Knitter has designed a houndstooth pattern which uses slip stitch instead of stranding, so if you dislike fair isle, this is the pattern for you! You can find the pattern on her blog here:

http://thesexyknitter.blogspot.com/2013/10/new-pattern-urban-houndstooth-cardigan.html

My next step with the Dinky Pull will be to block the front and back and then cast on for the sleeves. As a precaution, I test washed my gauge swatch and it looked so bad that I will definitely not be washing my finished pieces, I will block them dry with pins, spritz a bit of water on them and put a damp towel on top. Here is the washed swatch:

I do not have much experience knitting with angora, but I'm not sure it is a hand-washable fabric. My Eve in red angora looks pretty hairy after washing and I am starting to consider just dry cleaning my angora knits. Anyway, after all the work I did on my fair isle pieces to create this houndstooth pattern, I would have been devastated if I had thoughtlessly washed it and gotten this result, so I am very happy I took an extra step. I will have to design my own version of the sleeves, so this pullover still has a way to go.

If any of you know of any other great houndstooth patterns obtainable online or in current magazine issues, please share them with us!