Oh! I forgot to show you that Blue Mess I mentioned in the  Heavenly Heligan post didn’t I?

This is the afore mentioned Blue Mess

From Amelia

I will tell you of its metamorphosis into quite a pleasing jumper 😀

It started life as some “buying up in the yarn sale frenzy” stash yarn of Navy Blue Rowan Milk Cotton DK. If it hadn’t been in the sale I doubt I would have bought it. Navy blue is a colour that I know is sensible and useful and a great foil for other colours but I’m reluctant to use it.

“Why?” I hear you ask! “Please tell us?”

It was the colour of my school uniform of course! Is there a human out there who willingly wears their school uniform colour within 20 years of leaving school?

This pattern, however, cried out to that Navy yarn, promising to look stylish with jeans but smart enough to wear to the office…

From Amelia

It’s Amelia by Julia Frank from Rowan Magazine 51.

The stitch pattern is interesting – made by wrapping the yarn once, twice or three times around the needle to make the different sized loops. Three rows of pain stocking stitch then do it again, this time offsetting where the “big loops” fall to be over the “normal” stitches to give you a regular oblong. This offsetting of the loopy bits was surprisingly difficult once I started the shaping – ok – not “difficult” but I had to pay attention. The only other problem was that I kept sticking my thumb through the loops as I was knitting and pulling them – Tsk!

Here’s a close up of that stitch pattern – really effective for such a simple technique huh?

From Amelia

Knitting Amelia was the easy part. Especially when Ziggy decided to help…

From Amelia

Sewing her up was more of a challenge! You have to take the loopy pattern all the way to the last stitch of the work to keep shape correct. If you did a knit stitch at the end of every row the edges wouldn’t be as long as the middle where you had all the loopy stitches. that meant I was trying to sew up thin air! (and this was probably the reason I procrastinated sewing her up!) All I could do was go back to basics of mattress stitch and concentrate on going “under two bars of yarn” with each stitch and ignoring the fact some of those stitches seemed a yard long 🙁

Funnily enough – that seemed to work!

What do you think – finished of around that shoulder and sleeve?

From Amelia

Enough taking about making it – here’s me in the finished Amelia – although I really don’t like that picture of me…

From Amelia

I did try hiding behind a spider plant but Ben said he couldn’t see Amelia…

From Amelia

I think maybe the back view looks better 🙂

From Amelia

Amelia was a pleasure to knit, a bit of a leap of faith to sew up and surprisingly versatile to wear – a scoop neck, short sleeve t-shirt fits under her a treat without showing around the neck and peeking out under the arms (which bothers me!)

I’m now finding myself looking longingly at Frontier – the cardigan version!

From Amelia