We’re welcoming November around these parts with the release of our ninth (!) Boost Your Knitting pattern, the Sooper Sweater, designed by Anna Maltz. This totally charming child’s jumper features Anna’s well-loved marlisle technique, which combines holding two yarns together (marling) with stranded colourwork (or Fair Isle) to create bold motifs that feature three colour/texture combinations in a single row. Cool!
Photo © Jesse Wild.
Marlisle is the brainchild of Anna Maltz. While other knitting traditions might occasionally have made use of a similar technique of holding together yarns and working stranded colourwork, Anna dreamed up the term marlisle and has laid out the technique in her excellent book, Marlisle: A New Direction in Knitting. It’s easy to feel sometimes that there’s nothing new under the sun, but marlisle is a great reminder that there are always new things to discover and learn in our knitting!
Photo © Jesse Wild.
The Sooper Sweater is a great, manageable sized project for practising some of the key techniques of marlisle — and the good news is you’re probably already familiar with most of the techniques the pattern will use, it’s just a matter of putting them together in a new way! The sweater begins with a garter stitch sleeves and body worked in two yarns from the bottom up — beginning with a sleeve provides a great shortcut for knitting a gauge swatch in the round (the important thing being to measure the gauge once you have worked a bit and washed and blocked it)! The marlisle action comes at the yoke, and the method allows for the creation of bold zig zags that would be difficult to achieve with traditional stranded colourwork without some really long floats.
Photo © Jesse Wild.
The Sooper Sweater is worked up in two colours of our own Something to Knit With 4ply, which makes for a cozy and soft marled fabric which still has lovely stitch definition. It’s sized for children from 6 months to 10 years — you’ll need between two and five skeins each of two colours, depending on the size you choose.
As usual, we’ll be hosting a Boost Your Knitting November KAL over in the Ravelry group all month long. Any pattern using this month’s featured technique is welcome, so if knitting a children’s jumper isn’t in your plans at the moment, you can jump in with any of Anna’s great adult sweater or accessory patterns that use marlisle. And if you’d like to knit the Sooper Sweater, you can snag Boost Your Knitting in the online shop, where you’ll also find the autumn yarn kit (which includes yarn for the Sooper Sweater, the Marangoni Hat and Flying Leaves Scarf) and all ten shades of Something to Knit With 4ply.
It is also that time in the season when we launch the next seasonal kit… The Boost Your Knitting Winter Kit is now available, and contains all the yarns for the final set of three Boost projects. The kit costs £52, and you can find it here: Boost Your Knitting Winter Kit