The cow and the reptile

Finally finished object: Cow sweater for my niece. She commissioned this sweater when she turned 18, it should be a look-alike to a sweater she loved as a kid, and it took me just 2,5 years to knit it..... why? Because I took some side-tracks in-between and knitted some other easier projects, because this was a hard one. I had forgotten a bit how tiresome it is to do this kind of color-blocking work were you need to twist the two colours of yarn on the backside, and you need to deal with the mess of 7-10 yarn balls getting completely tangled up. But hey I managed! Hehe.

So it’s me to the left (the reptile or dinosaur, whichever you like) wearing my COS sweater and my niece to the right wearing her cow-sweater that I knitted. 

I developed the pattern myself. The nice thing about knitting is that you can approach it just like a pixel painting. So basically I just used some checkered paper and the tried to make a drawing looking like a cows spots, asymmetric and irregular.

Here came then also the difficulty of the knit. Because of the complete irregularity and randomness of the pattern you need to look and count on every single row. It’s not a knit to relax with, it actually requires high concentration.

I used twisted rib on the edges, I just love the twisted rib, because it gives such a nice definition, on the neckline I made a double folded edge, I love the puffyness it creates, opposed the the flatness of the single layer.

The beloved sweater from 15 years earlier

Sketch

From when I just started and had not realized yet I would need to toggle 7-10 yarn-balls simultanously