window shopping...

Went out for a quick look on Granville Street and saw what looked liked a fairisle machine knit sweater from the early ‘80's - back then, someone had given Princess Diana a red sweater with white sheep marching back and forth and there was one black sheep. It became all the rage and duplicate sweaters showed up all over England, both hand-knit and machine-knit. I did see some of these machine-knit in fairisle with huge, long floats all over the inside. I knew an English lady, Muriel, who used to custom knit for a ‘bloke’. She lived on a farm in England and, to earn some extra money, she did sewing, alterations and machine knitting for the man who owned the local sewing shop. He would provide her with the yarn, the punchcards and the pattern written out in whatever sizes he wanted and she’d knit up the blanks or pieces and deliver them on her next trip to town. He had someone else to do ‘the making up’ or finishing work of seaming and cut’n’sew neckline. Although she made many of these sheep pieces, she never learned to properly make a complete sweater and was afraid of necklines! He only taught her what she needed to know to do his jobs.

Anyway, back to the sweater here, it had rows of white foxes (I think) going back and forth and then, at the bustline, there was a full row of black sheep going across...it was enough to catch my attention and make me go in to investigate. Don't get me wrong - it was pretty yuccky! It was a fine to standard gauge weight made with a harsh scratchy wool and had a cut'n sew neck with a button placket on one shoulder (making me think they didn't know how to do necklines either!) but, I was surprised to see that on  the inside, it was made like I did with Marnie’s ‘DogON’ cardigan from KNITWORDS No 44.

Marnie's had some lettering, some plain stockinette rows and some rows of fairisle with furry yarn that caused some trouble. I used a variety of tricks to deal with the long floats and particularly, I found that switching to a method I call semi-jacquard did the job for the fairisle rows - most importantly, did not alter the gauge or the thickness of the fabric.

Semi-jacquard can be introduced anywhere in the garment without too much trouble. Bring up the rib bed and use only every 5th or 6th needle on the rib bed, set to knit on every other row only, providing a good method of tying up the floats. The knit carriage is set to slip/jacquard and the rib bed is set to knit only every other row, therefore a vertical line is not made on the front of the fabric which an every row rib stitch would make. I manually changed the yarn which I felt was quicker and simpler than setting up the yarn changer. For more on this, look in No 44, ‘making a theme sweater’...

I forgot to look at the tag and see where that fox and sheep thing was made...
Anyway, if you google ‘Princess Diana’s sheep sweater’, you’ll get lots of variations...that's were I scooped the princess sweater photo...

PS. My LK made it safely, everything’s intact. The girls at Westjet in Thunder Bay got a big kick out of my gun case and they loved the ‘I (heart) Machine Knitting’ sticker. Coming soon, an LK version of socks!