Author: Admin

My eldest son asked me to knit him a Star Wars sweater so I started with the idea of using R2-D2 and this sweater was born.  Many of you on Instagram have asked me to write up this pattern but since Star Wars is someone else’s intellectual property I’m going to show you what I did and make the charts I used freely available to anyone.

I started with the free pattern, Nordic Yoke Set Pullover from Patons, and changed the charts for the yoke and bottom of the body.  I also decided to skip the colored ribbing on the cuffs and body for the purely selfish reason of saving the gray to knit another sweater for my younger son next fall (he wants a BB8 sweater!).

YOKE

The yoke has an X-wing (as viewed from above), R2-D2 and a light saber.

I used the exact dimensions of the Nordic Yoke Pullover Sweater chart, so you can simply use this chart in it’s place and it will work just fine.  Some lines have more than 2 colors – in many cases I chose to come back later and use duplicate stitch so as to avoid carrying 3 or 4 colors in one row of stranded colorwork.  If you’re adept at carrying 3 or 4 colors in 1 row of colorwork, good for you!  I also used a backstitch-like technique from my cross stitching days called straight stitch to delineate R2D2’s legs.  This is represented by an orange line in the colorwork chart.  you can ignore this if you wish.  I did the outlining in the same tan color I used for the yoke background.

Click the small picture of the chart above to see the full size chart.

BOTTOM OF SWEATER

I did have to change this chart.  The sweater uses an 8-st repeat but I just couldn’t get a tie-fighter to look good in 8 sts.  I used 9.  If you use this bottom chart, YOU MAY HAVE TO ADJUST the number of body stitches before starting the colorwork as follows:

• Sizes 4 and 10 – no changes needed
• Sizes 6 and 12 – decrease 3 sts the row BEFORE you start the colorwork
• Size 8 – increase 3 sts the row BEFORE you start the colorwork

Click on the small picture of the chartbelow to see the full size chart.

The only changes I made to the pattern itself were to make the arms and torso longer than called for so that it will still fit my son in the fall (I hope!)

I haven’t been a very productive knitter this past year. It’s been quite a busy year with a new baby, plus I had yarn discontinued right as I was about to release a pattern in it. Twice. Twice in just the last 4 months. It all sort of killed my knitting and designing mojo.

But today I’m getting back to the needles. I had a lovely day to myself to drive out to Webs in Northampton, MA to do some shopping and planning (and eating because Northampton has AMAZING restaurants!!). I have seven different patterns outlined. My ambitious release schedule gives me 18 months to release them all. It’ll probably take more like two years, what with two small children at home, but I’m going to try hard to meet my initial release schedule.

The first two, both scheduled for this autumn, are my first men’s sweater and a boy’s cabled pullover. I designed the men’s sweater for my husband and I’m quite proud of it. It’s ready to photograph. This evening I showed the red yarn for the boy’s sweater to my 4 year old and he was very excited (red is his favorite color). I’ll be casting that one on this weekend.

Now that my little guy is nearly 2 months old I’m starting to knit regularly again. In all honesty, I need to knit. It relaxes me and gives me a little bit of “Mommy Time” which I don’t get much of these days as I have an almost-4-year-old too.

So I’m currently planning what the next years’ pattern designs will be. Of course, things are bound to change, but I’m currently planning to work on the following designs, in no particular order:

• women’s lace cardigan
• men’s cable pullover
• women’s version of my Kid Who Has Everything sweater (most requests we’ve ever had!)
• lace headband
• baby blanket (nearly complete)
• toddler cabled sweater (nearly complete)
• silk lace shawl
• paper yarn lace shawl
• gradient lace shawl

In addition, we’ll be appearing at craft fairs in southern New England selling patterns and hand-made knit items.

As many of you know, I’m due to have a baby in just 2 weeks.  We are very excited about this new addition to our family, but as you can imagine my knitting time will be severely curtailed for the next few months.

Basically, I’m taking the summer off of designing.  I have a few patterns queued up to release this fall/winter that have been in the pipeline for a while, so you will see new patterns from me over the next 6 months but I don’t plan on designing anything new until I start getting a decent amount of sleep again!

Thanks to all of you for your support and I hope you enjoy our current patterns until I’m able to release some new items.  On the plus side, I’ll now have a new model to photograph so more infant patterns may be coming your way for next Spring. 🙂