Malcolm's Pony Sweater With Malcolm's sweater, I got to work out more details for the intarsia technique that I discovered in Morgayn's Slytherin sweater. Malcolm wanted a grazing pony for the front of his sweater. I'm no artist, and the animals I draw usually look like another species. Thus, I went searching through books, magazines, and online for a grazing pony to trace. Once I found the model, I enlarged it and traced it on knitter's graph paper. During my pattern search, I saw a sweater that had a fairisle chain above and below a prancing pony. I liked the idea, and so I charted a simple chain to use on Malcolm's sweater. I did the body chains as duplicate stitch after the sweater was finished, but knit in the ones on the arms. About a third of the way into the raglan increases on Malcolm's sweater, the sweater was looking much more tightly knit than the gauge swatch (as can happen when you gauge flat and then knit round). The gauge swatch was 4.5 stitches and 6.67 rows per inch. The sweater itself is coming out 5.25 stitches and 6.4 rows per inch. I seldom get a discrepancy at all, and I've never had one that big before. I just reworked the raglan increases for the sweater so that it fits the gauge I'm getting as I knit. I needed more increases, and I needed to do them more frequently in the middle section than I was planning. If I had been knitting flat and then piecing, I'd have had to rip out the whole thing and start over. The brown parts of the horse were worked flat in the sweater, with stitches slipped as necessary. The mane and tail were done as duplicate stitch, and the eye was a golden bead. I used Cascade 220 for this project. It worked well for the previous two projects for which I used it, but the plum-colored yarn I used for Malcolm's sweater was a big disappointment. It balled and pilled badly even before the sweater was finished. These pictures were taken almost a year after the sweater was finished. Malcolm wears it constantly in cool weather. Malcolm outgrew his pony sweater, and passed it on to his younger brother. I knit him a new one, with a gray unicorn on a blue ground. The yarn is Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride worsted, which is a little heavier than the Cascade 220. I knit this one with a round yoke instead of a raglan. The yoke detail works better in this version. Malcolm loves to wear it just as much as he loved the purple one.

Copyright © 2004 by Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.