Homemade Friday: Urban Hiker for Adele

This sweater was born out of necessity.  Adele only has two jackets – a light one and a heavy one that is so thick she can’t fit in her car seat with it on.  And you’re not really supposed to buckle the kids in there with a heavy jacket on anyway since it messes with the fit and is unsafe and could cause major catastrophes and all that other stuff that parents worry about.

So what I’ve been doing on cold days is to put Adele’s heavy jacket on over top of her light jacket for the walk to the car, then taking her heavy one off when we get to the car, just leaving the light one on for the ride.  It was a hassle, to say the least.

So I figured that if I could knit a heavier sweater for Adele that wasn’t too heavy, but also wasn’t too light, all of my problems would be solved.  Or at least my wintertime car seat problems.

I didn’t want to buy yarn because I’ve got a whole closet full of yarn that is just taking up space at the moment and I can’t really fit anything else in there without all of it falling on my head, so I thought I’d try to use some of it up before it overtakes everything. 

The only yarn I had that would fit the pattern without a lot of reworking on my part, which I didn’t want to do, was Debbie Bliss merino chunky.  Also my children have an aversion to ‘itchy sweaters’ so I also had to take that into account.

I bought this yarn in North Carolina, on mine and Christopher’s one and only vacation we ever took alone, if you don’t count that backpacking trip we took for our one-year wedding anniversary.  I think it was in 2004.  Maybe.  I honestly can’t remember.

But the point is the yarn was old.  And it has also been used a time or two, then ripped out because I didn’t like the pattern I was using it for.  And sometimes I would have to cut a strand because I had knit into the yarn wrong and messed everything up. 

So the skeins were fraught with pills and weird strings and breaks.  But I persevered.  Mainly because I didn’t want to have to pull everything back again and rework the pattern with a different yarn.

And it’s not that bad.  It actually turned out better than I thought it would.  The sweater is thick enough and warm.  And it’s soft.  And I got to use up some of my stash.

I sewed the zipper on myself.  I normally leave that to my mother because I’m not very good at it.  I never know how to tie the knots at the end to keep the thread from unraveling.  But I did it anyway because I needed the sweater done.

I’m sure I will need her to fix it when the zipper starts falling off.

Pattern: Urban Hiker from Pacific Knits

Yarn: Debbie Bliss Merino Chunky in a dark purple, which I think is discontinued now.