Projects
An Imitation Game Cowl
Benedict Cumberbatch has a demented legion of fans, and I like the guy. He’s a great Sherlock, and a fine codebreaker. I think. I confess I don’t remember much about The Imitation Game except a cardigan. I am quite possibly The Number-One Superfan of Keira Knightley’s Cardigan Featured in The Imitation Game.
Deliciously dowdy. Only in a movie with the most intense brainiac nerds could a cardigan like this appear foxy. She wears the thing for most of the movie. So brainy, Keira! Smart women wear cardigans.
About halfway through the movie I started calculating the pattern. By the end I knew I had to go for it. That Fair Isle pattern had to be mine.
Kimberly Harbrecht over at Knit Julep did a brilliant job decoding the knits of The Imitation Game. I found a stitch chart for Keira’s cardigan posted by a good-hearted person on Ravelry, but it was incorrect, so I won’t link to it. It did get me started, however, so I’m grateful for that.
I began this project back during the wintry, dark times, knitting in a fever with an optimistic belief that I had dug out enough skeins of Alice Starmore Campion to get me a nice, double-wrapping cowl.
Turning the cowl inside out and working the Fair Isle with the strands on the outside makes the strands a tiny bit longer. The whole thing behaves better. A narrow tube like this can be a mess if you work it with the front side out, because the strands can take a shortcut inside the tube and pull the tube too tight.
Last week, I excavated this project from the depths of my closet, in a KonMari/KayAnn Method moment. Joy! Joy sparked! I love this thing! But now I remember why I freaked out last winter and crammed this into Unfinished Object Tote Bag Zone B. There is a serious problem looming. I’m about halfway done, but there are ominously small balls of the green yarns left.
If I knit fast enough, I think I can finish before I run out.
As I commented somewhere else, I highly recommend this video from Philosopher’s Wool for colorwork knitting, especially in the round. They teach four, easily learned stitches which weave the yarn in as you go. You never knit more than two stitches of one color so no long floats. And the big bonus is your yarns never get twisted up! I’m very far from an expert knitter and have only done a few stranded colorwork pieces in my life, but this method made it so much more enjoyable for me. Even when I knit a sweater that was not in the round, I could at least use this on the right side rows. I think I even figured something out for the purl rows, but I’m not sure now. It was a long time ago.
https://www.philosopherswool.com/Pages/Twohandedvideo.htm
Thanks for the love, Ann! I don’t know how I missed your shout out but it’s made my week now. Happy knitting!