Fearless Fibers Yarn

My Husband’s Not Really a Moron

According to dictionary.com, a moron is: “A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.”

Hmmm … maybe my husband is a moron. Ha! (That is, of course, totally untrue and uncalled for. I’m just having a bit of fun on the off chance that my darling, sweet, beloved husband actually decides to read his darling, sweet, beloved wife’s blog!)

So why am I talking about my husband and his case of mild retardation? I’ll get to that shortly.

After my last post about knitting for others versus knitting for oneself I got to thinking about what I’ve knit for husband. Have I been neglecting him? We’ve been together about two years now and married for one. Mostly, I’ve knit socks for him. In fact, I’ve probably made him about eight pair and I’m happy to say that he does appreciate them and does wear them pretty frequently. He has even been seen jumping up and down in the bowling alley (we are league bowlers, geeky I know) in his stocking feet crying, “Look how springy! They are my magic bowling socks!”

I’ve also knit him two sweaters, one this past winter and one the winter before. The first one I knit for him is a very bulky pullover in an allover Chevron pattern that he wore all of one time. My fault. The sweater is beautiful but it’s just too heavy for him. He’s one of those guys who’s always warm.

For hubby’s second sweater, I was smarter about it. I included him in the decision-making and design process. He liked the idea of simple pullover that would fit loosely so that he could wear it over something else and just take it off if he got too warm.

I had it in mind to use Elsbeth Lavold’s Silky Wool. If you aren’t familiar with this yarn, it’s a blend of silk and wool but the silk is raw silk, so there’s no sheen whatsoever to it and it also has just a hint of a nubby texture to it, although not nearly enough texture to interfere with the stitch definition or to feel in the least bit rough. The yarn is very light and airy, so the sweater is not too heavy to be practical. It’s also a good value yarn, with nice yardage because of the light, airy quality. (A 50 gram skein retails around $7 if I recall correctly and has 192 yards.) The entire sweater for hubby only cost about $80 or so. That may not sound inexpensive to new knitters, but believe me, it’s a very good price for a quality yarn. Someday I’ll tell you about the shawl I knit two years ago which cost me … ready for this … hang on because you might faint … omg … deep breath … around $275! And this was not a fancy, novelty yarn. It’s nice yarn, but just a tencel and wool blend. EEK!

To further involve hubby in the sweater process, we went to my favorite LYS together to buy the yarn. We spread out all of the color choices for the Silky Wool yarn and he chose three. I don’t recall the names of the colors he chose, but he picked a darkish gray, an olive shade of green, and a deep purple. Yep. Green, purple and gray. But somehow they seem to work together.

And so now we finally get to the point where I explain why I began this post by saying that my husband is not really a moron. I made this point because when I asked him to model the sweater this morning so that I could take a blog-photo, he simply would not stop making goofy faces and standing in silly “model” positions. Sigh.

OK. Fine then. Your picture is going on my blog looking like a moron. AND … you also look like you’re going bald! (Which he sort of is, but not nearly so much as the photo makes it appear.)

So here is My Husband The Dolt in his sweater.



For the most part, I like the way it came out. The sweater is large on him but that was mostly intentional, as I knew he wanted to wear it over something else (which he is not in the photo). It has no ribbing on the bottom, which is important because my beloved hubby would prefer to camouflage the basketball he has been growing around his midsection these past few months (sign of a happy marriage, I suppose?).

Here’s a closeup of the stitch detail.



It’s a very simple slip garter 4-row repeat. In this sweater, with the three colors, I simply alternated: two rows of color A, two rows of B, two rows of C, throughout. For those who haven’t tried a slip garter like this, following is the stitch pattern. It’s one of my favorites as it creates what looks like fairly intricate colorwork but really is not, as you are never working with more than one color on the same row. The slip stitches do the magic by drawing one color upward into the next.

Row 1: Knit
Row 2: Knit
Row 3: K1, *SL1 purlwise, K1, repeat from * to end
Row 4: K1, *YF, SL1 purlwise, YB, K1, repeat from * to end

SL1 = slip 1
YF = yarn forward
YB = yarn back

Alright. Enough of all this chat about a sweater I finished a few months ago! What about now? I’ve temporarily scrapped the tentative plan I mentioned in a previous post about doing a lacy cashmere summer top. I may do that eventually, but now I’m intrigued by a shawl. Anne of Knitspot sent me a wonderful gift of two of her patterns, one of which is an ostrich plume shawl that I really like. Now I think that shall be the next project I begin, although I don’t know whether it will be for myself or a gift for someone else. (See that … circled right back around to the topic of knitting for oneself versus someone else.)

I suppose I should stop rambling on now and go get some work done.

Thanks to the new folks who popped in with a couple of comments to my last post! Hope to hear from you again.

Ahhhh … and here’s a teaser for anyone who actually happens to read all the way through to this point … I’m considering possibly admitting my deep, dark secret in my next posting. It has to do with the unusual thing that I do when I knit. Some people watch TV, some listen to music, but I think that very few people do what I do. And for some reason, I have kept this a secret from everyone but my hubby. Only he knows my DDS (deep dark secret, that is).

Happy Knitting!