Love, in knitted form
I think I'd known Dave for about a month when he first asked me to knit him a sweater. He has a thing for silly sweaters and as we talked about what kind of sweater he wanted, we came up with the idea to knit all our pets into it. How's that for silly? In fact, he floated the idea that he get a sweater covered in dachshunds and that Arnold should get one covered in Daves. I may still knit that sweater for Arnold actually . . .
Because I couldn't find a dachshund chart to work from, I decided to chart out the animals and work up a hat first, so that I could make sure the charts worked out. What you see above is the hat I knit for Dave while I spent a week on a cruise ship with my parents and sister, missing him terribly. I think it came out awesome! Although my color choices left a lot to be desired, and greatly influenced the work on the sweater.
A few days ago, I got to the colored yoke of his sweater and stopped to take a picture:
What you see up there is a row of snakes (he has a pet snaked named Ladysnake) and a row of XO's. Here's a closeup:
I'm afraid the snakes don't look all that much like snakes (in fact, I keep seeing sperm when I look at this picture!), but I'm going to embroider eyes onto a few of them to make it more obvious what they are.
I decided to make the sweater out of St Denis Nordique because the yarn is so lovely to work with and comes in so many great colors. Because we were planning such a detailed yoke design, I knew I needed to work in fine-gauge yarn, and Nordique is perfect in that way too. The only problem? Knitting a sweater for a fairly large man at 6 stitches to the inch.
The sweater is 51" around.
It's also 29" long.
The cast-on edge? 304 stitches.
After joining the sleeves? 429 stitches.
Of colorwork.
For 11".
This is an opus of a sweater, let me tell you!
I'm working on the neckline right now and after that there's only some ribbing and the finishing left. I'm aiming to finish by this weekend.
I did the math, and in all, the sweater will have about 75,000 stitches in it.
Like I said on the Ravelry project page: I must really love this man. =)
