May 1963: Viennese

My May project was this jumper “from a Viennese design” for a young relative whose birthday was in May. Spoiler: unfortunately, the jumper was not ready in time for the birthday. May went by so quickly and I feel like I hardly made progress on any of my multiple unfinished projects. Let’s hope the kid doesn’t have a growth spurt before I finally get this done.

The jumper is written in a narrow reverse-rib pattern and the interesting stitch design on the yoke is embroidered on later. The recipient of this project was not opposed to the embroidery but very adamant about wanting the garment to have a “smooth texture”, i.e. stocking stitch. I aim to please, so stocking stitch it was, except for the yoke.

Said relative lives in a warm climate and is somewhat sensitive to wool at the moment, so I decided to make it in fine cotton. The tension according to pattern is 14 1/2 stitches in 2 inches, which is as much as I can ever accomplish even with very fine yarn and tiny needles, so finding cotton that works for me at that gauge is difficult — most cotton yarns are mercerised DK weight for making dishcloths, accessories, amigurumi, etc. Of course, there is always fine crochet cotton, but that is usually also mercerised (I don’t like the shininess of mercerised cotton.) Mayflower DK makes a lovely fine-gauge cotton that is hard to find in stores and can’t be ordered from their (Danish-language only) website. Yarn stores were still closed in my area in any case when I started this project and I didn’t have anything appropriate in stash. Luckily, the wonderful Hamburger Wollfabrik spinning mill company (as in, the German city of Hamburg, not the food! I realise that name sounds funny when you read it in English…), which was closed for a long time after a burst pipe caused severe water damage a while ago, is back up and running online with a brand new website and a beautiful selection of yarns of different fibres and weights. I chose the super-combed cotton in a 4-ply weight and a spearmint green colour.

I was happy with the weight and colour of the yarn but unpleasantly surprised to see that it was completely un-plied! Nowhere on the website does it say what kind of twist they use, nor is there an option to select what you want, but the yarn in the sample colour photos definitely looks plied and my yarn was utterly not. It is really, really hard to work with un-plied cotton, as it just splits everywhere. I guess I should call them next time I order from them and ask about that.

It is also very lightweight, which is lovely. I used that to my advantage by making the finished garment short-sleeved, making it a fancy knitted T-shirt and not a jumper. but the finished garment will be more like a T-shirt than a jumper. I tried a couple of combinations for the yoke and decided to make it in the pattern stitch with the large contrasting cross-stitch “pyramid” design in bright orange.

It blocked out kind of uneven, as I didn’t have a clothes dryer. Strange to have a knitted item that should not be dried flat! But I think this cotton needs the evening-out and fluffing-up effect of a dryer.

The combination of boring stocking stitch and un-plied yarn made progress very slow, but I got it finished by the middle of June, at least. Let’s hope the kid likes it!