Since a lot (and I mean A LOT) of people really loved my lattice work with roses knitted shirt, I thought I'd do a full overview post with all the details including the pattern, yarn, how long it took me, some details, etc!
(The picture above is pre-wash, it's since been washed and has already dried and is fully ready to wear now!)
The pattern for this shirt is the Weldons A794 lattice fair isle jumper. I found it on Ravelry initially but there wasn't an actual download or buy option available there, so in the end after some searching I found an Etsy shop (Pretty Old Patterns) that sold a scanned version and I got it from there.
It's a vintage pattern, which means you knit it flat and in panels, and then sew all the panels together. The instructions were mostly very clear to me, and the shirt itself wasn't difficult to make. If you can do colour work you can make this shirt. There's no sizing, if you need a bigger size you get a bigger needle.
I've been asked by multiple people, both irl and online, why I didn't do it in the round. There are several reasons for this, aside from the part where I simply hate knitting in the round, namely most importantly that with the intarsia it's impossible. This pattern has 5 colours, and it's impossible to keep dragging those 5 strands of yarn along the whole time. You'd end up with the bulkiest shirt, plus you'd need several times the amount of yarn. As it is, I used a couple of skeins of the main colour (the blue-ish one), 1.5 skein for the lattice work (gold/yellow), and half a skein for each colour in the roses (green, pink, and red).
If you're planning to make this, or something similar with a lot of colourwork/fair isle/intarsia/etc, I highly, highly recommend weaving in ends as you go. This was an absolute lifesaver for me. Weaving in as you go means taking the end of a string along and wrapping it around the yarn you're actively working with at every stitch. I did this for anywhere from 7-12 stitches and then often brought it back in the next row. Here's what that looks like on the inside all finished and tidied up:
And this is what it looks like before going through and checking to make sure every bit is properly woven in and/or weaving it in later:
The fish you see on the right there are for the lattice work specifically. This way I could just wind a bunch of the yellow/gold yarn onto the fish and do the intarsia that way and keep going for longer without the yarn getting in the way or constantly having to attach new yarn. For the roses I cut off strands of ~32 inch for the green and ~27 inch for the red and pink, which is longer than the 24 inch the pattern says to use for everything, but I found that wasn't quite enough to make it to the end.
The yarn I used is all from Drops, specifically Drops Flora (65% wool, 35% alpaca) and Drops Alpaca (100% alpaca). When I started I could buy all this in town, which means I actually went to a store and put the colours together with some help from the shop owner. Sadly she's closed her shop in the meantime, so I'm very glad I had enough and didn't have to figure out colour batches or whatever to order online. I actually used less yarn than the pattern called for and have plenty left over!
Because of the nature of both sheep and alpaca wool, this means the shirt has a lot of...structure??? to it. It's a bit fuzzy, and I am a little worried it might be a bit scratchy, but I need to wear a shirt underneath this anyway so it's probably fine. I also have to handwash it, this absolutely can not go into the washing machine, but that's fine, I have a bunch of both knitted clothes and actual vintage/antique clothes that all have to be hand washed and I know the drill by now lol.
Also I used 2.5mm needles that I definitely didn't accidentally bend several times so they're now super wonky. I feel like that's pretty small for a shirt by modern standards? But also I knit mostly vintage/historical so I don't really know tbh.
And a bonus sidenote: I used actual vintage mother of pearl buttons for the shoulder closure that I was gifted by someone who had no use for them. I think they're maybe a little bit big and showy for this shirt but I just really liked the idea of actual vintage buttons on it. Maybe I'll replace them at some point, but for now they're very, very stuck on there.
This project took me absolutely forever oh my god. I bought the yarn in may, and I finished the project in april, so from start to end it's almost a full year. To be fair, I had a busy year and also buggered off to the other side of the world for a month, and took another month to knit my first pair of socks. Still, that puts this project at 8-10 months total - and yes I do actually know someone who had an actual baby in the meantime and we've made jokes about how my shirt took longer to make than for her to grow a new human.
Like I said, the pattern itself isn't difficult per se. However, between keeping track of the intarsia, the shaping of the shirt itself, and the ends of the yarn, I had to pay attention at every stitch and constantly had to keep track of where each strand had to go, when to drop which one or pick which one up. This did make the process very slow and mentally taxing, with 100+ stitches per row.
I had printed the pattern and kept track a lot by making notes and counting things out on the papers which did help a lot:
I did bring this project to the knitting club I go to but my project bag always had the actual project on the needles, extra yarn, these 3 papers, a pen, scissors, a crochet hook for if I dropped some stitches, a measuring tape, and spare fish if I had them lmao.
I'm not gonna lie though: I was really struggling to actually finish this by the last few months. I'm really glad I finished it, but I got really tired of this project several times and definitely prioritized some completely different hobbies for a while. I definitely feel like my brain and also the rest of me need a long break after this (I say while having decided to make a granny square blanket next).
I was also really afraid it wasn't actually going to fit. I had done gauge swatches before I started but without the colourwork (BAD IDEA), and I very carefully tried on the main body at one point when I had just clipped it together with stitch markers and it did not fit then. But I tried it on again (very very scared) after I'd actually sewn it together and it fit! Barely but it did! It hopefully probably fits better too now it's washed, and if it doesn't I can still try blocking it if I want to. But for now, I am tired and don't want to work on it any more.
I will say it's shorter than I expected, shorter also than other vintage clothes I have, so keep that in mind if you're considering making this. For me it just about reaches the bottom of my rib cage, and the bottom actually sits just above my actual waist. I tried it on with pyjama pants and to be fair it did make my legs look much longer than they are, so I guess that's an upside to the shortness of it lol.
And that's it! Project done! I can finally move on to other things!
To everyone who followed my progress, thank you so much! It's been so fun seeing how many people were interested in my silly project and asked for information and updates (and complimented me a lot hehehehehe). I think I went through all the most common questions I got but if you have any other questions (or compliments) feel free to drop them in the replies, send an ask, or to dm me!
I tag all my knitting projects with the same tags (#adventures in knitting, #knitting, #knitblr) so if you want you can scroll back and see the updates happen as I went and also previous (and upcoming) projects.
Ok thank you for reading, byeee
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