Lily in Lilyhammer

I fell in love with this cute little top Lily, when Andrea in Fruitiknitting reviewed the Springtime collection by Marie Wallin. I notice that I often fall for her patterns, but I have not knitted any of them before. The Orkney cardigan is beautiful, and I even have the pattern, but there it stops: The cardigan is all over colourwork, worked flat (front left and right, back, sleeves) and then seamed. I just can't get why anybody would do that. I also find it hard to knit from the black and white charts she uses, with symbols for each colour where it's hard to see the overall pattern in all the different symbols. 

So when I decided to make this top, which the pattern says to work in pieces, front, back, sleeves, there had to be adaptations. I started in August, to join the fair isle garment knitalong with the Fruityknitting podcast. I didn't finish in time, terrible non-monogamous knitter that I am. 

I changed it from worked flat, to worked in the round. I did a false seam working the two colours together in the side. My row gauge was off, so I had to to more pattern repeats. That gave me another row of roses on the chest, which I'm very happy about. I also wanted the sleeve pattern to match the body, so I did that, and joined the sleeves as I went, with a false seam faking set-in-sleeves. I did steeks for the back and front neck openings. All because I don't like stranded purling. In the end I had to do 64 sts of colourwork purling on the shoulders - I can live with that. 

I really like the crochet neck edging, will use that again. 

The yarn is a thin wool, Holst Garn Supersoft, Karmin Supersoft, Malsen og Mor Shetland soft and Magasin Duett Supersoft - which I believe all come from the same mill and is essentially the same yarn. It is super soft when washed and I wear it happily next to my skin, as you can see.