I'm very pleased to bring you this FO Friday. This jumper has been a WIP for a long, long time. Three years in fact. If you read my WIP Wednesday post from April you would have seen that the reason I had lost interest in it. I was struggling to get the right size and was planning to frog it. But some blocking mid project solved that problem and saved me the heartache of having to start again. All that was left was some speedy sleeve knitting and voila! A finished jumper.

With this FO blog post I shall talk through the pattern after having introduced the yarn in the WIP Wednesday post.

The Roland Jumper by Dieuwke Schack-Mulligen is a DK weight textual jumper. It has a really nice all over basket weave design that runs the length of the body after seperating for the sleeves. This keeps the pattern clean and simple and avoids anything too complicated around the raglan increases. This jumper is knit seamlessly from the top down and in the round which means it is reversible. The raglan increases are minimal which means they look great from the knit side and the purl side. I found this pattern fairly simple to follow, although the different sizing instructions are written quite densly so a highlighter might be a good idea to keep track of the size you are knitting. This pattern requires a knowledge of working in the round, increasing and decreasing and thats about it. The texture is made simply of knits and purls so a really a nice and simple way of adding depth to the design without overcomplicating things.

To knit this I paired a hand dyed yarn with a commercially dyed one. This way being able to make full use of a random single skein of yarn. We all have those lying around right? It was super easy to do and I think the results look great. My starting skein was Hedgehog Fibres Merino DK in the Fools Gold colour. Looking at the skein there are lots of colours that would work well as contrast. One idea would be to go complimentary with an orange. Or using the colour wheel as a guide and going with a something opposite orange for a high contrast. In this case blue. Also within hand dyed speckled yarn there are lots of different colours, so maybe let those speak to you for your contrast. Fools Gold has bit of blue in it so I knew blue was the way to go and I chose Socks Yeah DK Astra Planeti.

If you are wanting to pair a single skein with a main colour in this way there are ways you can on the Knit With Attitude website. For some help navigating colour at Knit With Attitude search the blog for the Knit A Rainbow Series I wrote looking at colours through the different yarns. Alternatively you can search Knit With Attitude by colour alone and this is how:

Go to the Knit With Attitude website and hover over the Yarn menu. On the right hand side you will see a box titled Shades. Here you will find all the different yarns grouped by colour.

You can then filter this by yarn weight by using the menu on the left. This a great way to browse the site and feels a bit more like being in the shop.

I wanted to use as much of the Hedgehog Fibres Merino DK as I could and this is really easy with top down seamless jumpers. Casting on with the Hedgehog Fibres I kept knitting until I had used it all up. I stopped at the top of the sleeves with the Hedgehog Fibres and just carried on with the body. I wasn't too worried that the Fools gold colour appeared more on the body than the sleeves, It formed part of the look.

My advice when knitting this would be to swatch over stocking stitch and the basket weave pattern. As I was knitting it the bounciness of the textured stitch was pulling in and making things seem way too small. If you block your swatch you will get an understanding on how the basket weave relaxes with your current yarn choice.

I would also refer to the schematics for all the separate measurements. I'm a just take one measurement of my chest and that will be fine kind of knitter. As a result the sleeves are a tad tight but not overly so. If I payed more attention I would have spaced out my decreases.

So now all I need is some cool weather and I will be wearing this jumper with pride.