48 Hours

I’m a fast knitter. I’ve always been a fast knitter. I sometimes like to compete with myself to see if I can break my speed records for things. 3 mittens in 24 hours, for instance, is my best small-item speed. I can often do a sock in the span of a day, if I don’t feel like working on anything else.

My first sweater record stood at nine days, which is how long it took to knit my blue Afmæli.

I actually knit a substantial amount of this at the beach on Plum Island one summer!

Then, I bashed it and knit this purple Skógafjall in six over a long Christmas break.

My beautiful roommate Andrea is modeling it here!

Finally (FINALLY), this past January, I made a Lopapeysa in five! This was only managed because I was able to do two sleeves in one Saturday.

This is a dumb selfie, and it’s also hard to see the yoke, which has a very cool ombre effect of turquoise fading to black.

But Lopapeysas are dense. While they’re simple, they have a lot of stitches. I was pretty sure that if I put my mind to it, I could get through a looser sweater more quickly. I really wanted to make a Love Note sweater with a different lace pattern, so I decided on Ranunculus. After searching on Ravelry, it turned out that a few people had also tried this, so I gratefully accepted the advice from one particular page, in which the knitter explains which rounds of the Ranunculus yoke she used as replacement for the Love Note lace section. It’s really useful. You can find it here: https://www.ravelry.com/projects/Em-for-Me/ranunculus

Whenever I cast something on guiltily (e.g. I have tons of other projects on the needles that I *should* be working on, but I just can’t resist a certain skein of yarn), I often try to power through it. And usually, I do. When I got through most of the yoke on the first evening, I thought, huh, I could do this in 48 hours if I really didn’t work on anything else.

Love-Note-Ranunculus after dividing for sleeves!

So…

Yoke close up so you can see the texture details

I did it in 48 hours.

d o n e

It’s a lot bigger than I anticipated, actually – I made it in a mohair-silk as well as a merino-silk. Using a 100% merino fingering-weight single is not quite so…stretchy, I think. I should probably have sized down a needle, but I already use a size 9 to make my Love Notes, which is smaller than usual! I do honestly love this sweater, though. I love the color, I love the softness, I love the halo, I love how different it is from the Love Note. (See below for a couple of my versions of Love Note!)

No, I am not planning to knit subsequent sweaters in 48 hours (unless I get REALLY into super-bulky garments) but I’m glad to be able to check off the box. It was exciting.