Silk Shrug

Just before xmas I bought a second-hand jumper for the very tidy sum of €2.50. It appeared to be at least partly hand-made and a small 'tag' of sorts said that the yarn was 100% silk. A long-sleeved, pure silk jumper for €2.50 - what a find!

Harvesting the yarn was a process unto itself, and I probably lost about 30 grams of the yarn in the un-knitting, due to accidentaly snipping the ends of rows whilst undoing the seams, etc. All in all, I managed to collect around 350 grams of lovely green-blue silky yarn. Part of it had a few stains on it, so I wound that section into its own ball for use in distress situations only. :-)

And so here's what became of that cabled jumper:


Pattern: Silk Shrug
Designer: Erika Knight
Source: Classic Knits: 15 Designs to Knit and Keep Forever
Needles: 3.0mm and 3.5mm addi turbos and bamboo dpns
Yarn details:

• 100% silk
• 150 grams used

Mods: I lengthened the section between the underarm and the shoulder by about four rows on both the fronts and back, and also lengthened the sleeve depth correspondingly. The sleeve arms are also longer, by 15 rows, i.e., I worked the ribbing, then 15 rows of stocking stitch, then started the decreases.


I actually ended up making three sleeves, as the first one somehow turned out with much larger gauge than the rest of it.

There have been comments from others floating around about the patterns in this book and how they're not so well-written. I would agree that this pattern didn't include a lot of detail, but for someone who is not a complete beginner it presents no problems. My only reservation about this book is the lack of schematics. Schematics are often really handy in imagining the work in three-dimensions and I use them a lot to calculate pattern modifications, so the whole way during this project I wasn't really sure if this was going to turn out alright. But somehow, it came out to be a really good fit.