Shortly after I moved into my new house I took a bookshelf that used to be stacked two-rows deep with books and filled it with yarn instead. This was among the best craft ideas that I have ever had.
Wait, let’s step back a minute. Well over five years ago, I got a very ambitious idea in my head that I would hand-knit a Christmas stocking for every member of my family and all the boyfriends or husbands we weren’t going away. Had I achieved this goal, I would have knit nine fair isle, oversized stockings, each individually named, with a reinforced toe (so it can support the weight of wine bottles) and a contrasting heel for good measure.
I bought all the yarn I needed to make all nine stockings, and identified different colors for every person so they would all coordinate without matching. Then, I spent a full month knitting my own, which I considered a test-run, and decided I did not want to make nine of these. I put all the yarn in a box, shoved it into the corner of my living room, and forgot about it.
When I moved, I finally had my own office in which to store everything. So instead of trying to hide the amount of stuff that was in our apartment, we could now thoughtfully display the things we have artfully placed around the house. So I took my entire yarn stash out of the boxes and bags I’d been storing it in for the better part of 20 years and put it on a shelf. Now it is nice and extremely cozy and colorful in my office, which is deeply comforting.
Long story short, I put all the different colors I had purchased for my overly ambitious and long since abandoned Christmas stocking project, and suddenly I saw that they all looked pretty good together. I also saw that I had a shit ton of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Sport in a bunch of colors that aren’t really in my wardrobe generally. Then, a few weeks later, I was flipping through Nicky Epstein’s Knitting on Top of the World and saw the Highland Fling Plaid Jacket.
In that moment, I needed to learn how to knit plaid. I realized that I had no idea how this could be done, and it seemed like sorcery. I also saw that I had more than enough yarn in more than enough colors to make this project. The major challenge is that while all my yarn was sport weight, this pattern is written for Aran weight. No problem, I said to myself, I’ll just tack on another pattern repeat and it’ll all come out in blocking. I kind of expected that this jacket would be oversized, and to me it was more important that the plaids all match than that it actually fit. I failed to do any gauging, fudged a bunch of numbers and knit size large as the pattern called for it.
You’ll be pleased to know that all of my plaids match and that this jacket is tremendously large and I love it.
Pattern: Highland Fling Plaid Jacket, Nicky Epstein’s Knitting on Top of the World
Yarn: Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Sport
Total yarn weight: 782 grams (about 1.7 pounds), which is about 16 balls.
Modifications: Added one extra repeat of the striping across all pieces, knit in size large.
Needles: Addi Click size 7
Yarn Review: This is an affordable and easy-to-work-with yarn that comes in a huge variety of sizes and colors. It’s 100% wool and softens beautifully over time.
Pattern Review: This pattern is crazy simple. Somehow it’s still taken me two months to finish it. Partially, that’s my fault for not realizing that sport weight yarn takes more stitches than Aran weight yarn to do the same thing. (I mean, I realized it, I just chose to ignore it.)
The jacket is knit flat and in pieces, with no shaping. It’s actually been a really long time since I knit a garment flat and seamed it together. I know I tried it a few times when I was just learning to knit and I found it to be stuffy and too much work, and I could cut corners by knitting in the round. This time around, it was kind of a refreshing change of pace. I blocked as I pulled each piece off the needles, blocking the fronts, collars and sleeves together so they’d all be the same size. Then I seamed them all together, knit an i-cord accent for the collar, put it on, marveled at the size of it. (An absolute unit of a cardigan.)
So how do you knit plaid?
You don’t. You knit a lot of horizontal stripes and add the vertical stripes using duplicate stitch after seaming your garment together. This process took my jacket from something it looked like I knit it while chilling out in Baja California, to something found in the Scottish Highlands.
To make so many color changes as I was creating the horizontal stripes, I learned how to do the Russian Join. That involves taking the ends of two lengths of yarn and weaving them back on themselves to create a strong transition between two colors, without an end to weave in later.
I learned how to do the duplicate stitch so I could finish this jacket, and now I feel like I have a shiny new tool in my stash. I’ll definitely use it again down the line to make future projects pop in really interesting ways.
I lost yarn chicken exactly one stripe short of completing this jacket. I finished weaving in all the ends while watching The Addams Family movie (the one from the 90s, it’s excellent) while deciding how much I cared. Ultimately, I decided that I cared enough to handle it now if someone on Ravelry had a single skein to get rid of. If I had to go back to Knitpicks, I would have cared a lot less. Thankfully a very nice lady in Michigan had one lonely skein of Wool of the Andes in Forest Heather and it arrived the day I pulled the finished project off the blocking mats.
