When it came time to pick a design for my niece Olivia's Christmas sweater, I searched Ravelry for a suitable pattern.
I narrowed my choices down to two patterns, then decided on the above design, which is I Can Sing a Rainbow, by Jenni Bennett. The other pattern was a classic design, but I thought screw it, I was going with the fun one. The time will come when I'll be making nothing but classic styles for Olivia. At present she's 5 years old, and this is my window for making her cute, whimsical designs because at this age she can relate to them rather than thinking that they're uncool. This pattern only ran to a size six, so this was my last chance to make it for her.
As for yarn choice, my first step was to go through my stash of DK yarn and pick out the heart colours. This is a great design for using up a lot of little odds and ends of yarn. It only take 10 grams of each colour. I found seven that looked pretty together, and made a yarn sampler that I could take to the store to use as a convenient aid in selecting the main colour for the sweater. I liked the idea of a neutral background colour, and decided I wanted an olive. It was a bit hard to find that, but in the end I went with Sandnesgarn Alpakka in shade 9554, which is a sort of olive khaki. I bought six skeins, or 300 grams.
And here's the completed sweater. I'm a little meh on the results. I wasn't thrilled with my arrangement of colours in the heart, but I wasn't going to ravel it all out and do it again, either. It will do, and I'm confident Olivia and her mother will both like it, which is what matters.
It only took 200 grams of the olive yarn to knit this sweater, so I shall have 2 skeins to return for store credit at Romni Wools. (I always think of whatever extra yarn I've purchased for a current project as a down payment on my next project.)
I had just 10 grams left over of the newly purchased olive yarn, and I used approximately 10 grams of each of the rainbow coloured stash yarn (or 70 grams), so that's a net stash decrease of -60 grams.
