Sea Glass Sweater featuring Season of the Witch & Latte

It’s officially done now, blocked, ends woven and ready to wear but I wanted to take a minute to talk you through the making of this sweater since I know it’s inspiring many of you to want to try it. There’s a lot of information to talk about, only because I want to be thorough, and not necessarily because it’s difficult, so stay with me! 

We have to start at the beginning though, and that is with my original Sea Glass Tee that I made back in 2021, when the first iteration of this design was released by Wool&Pine Designs. The Sea Glass Tee is a fingering weight t-shirt that uses 1x1 colorwork throughout the body (just like the Sea Glass Sweater). This pattern is designed to be a stash buster so you use two DIFFERENT colorways every single row to create this absolutely gorgeous mosaic of color. I am SUCH a sucker for anything with 1x1 colorwork so I cast on the day the pattern was released! It only took me 2 weeks to make because I just loved playing with all my colors- I actually used all my colorways from my featured collection at the time. I’ve always worked to make a collection of colorways that is really cohesive and this pattern really showed off my hard work.

My original Sea Glass Tee  is a sample in my shop and I usually bring it to shows, so I have a lot of conversations with customers about this design. I noticed though that a lot of people were intimidated about having so many ends to weave in, and also about choosing so  many colors to work with. For me, these were never hurdles, but I have a full collection of colors that were dyed to coordinate together to work with, and I make for a living so a few ends to weave in is never enough to slow me down. That being said,  I can certainly see how these concepts would be more challenging for the average maker.

Fast forward to last year, at the Fiber Festival of New England. I did a lot of brainstorming about how this sweater could be done using just two colorways, one highly variegated and one tonal. Would it be possible to get as interesting of an effect while still maintaining the original integrity of the design? I mulled this question over for a couple of months before finally jumping in and casting on.

I chose my favorite kettle dyed colorway Season of the Witch and knew Latte would be the perfect pair after seeing a Grid Gambit made in this color combination at the Cashmere Goat! I knew it would be good, but this combo still blew me away once I got going… I mean Wowzah!

I do want to take a minute to talk a little bit about Season of the Witch a little bit more though, as a lot of people had questions about the picture that I shared above, as it looks like I am using two different colorways with the Latte.

Here are three skeins of Season of the Witch on Plush DK that were all dyed together in the same pan! As you can see, non of them are identical. I use a kettle dyeing technique for this colorway where I pour the colors directly on the dye in layers. I play with heat and water levels as I continue to pour more and more colors over the yarn, while flipping and shaking up the yarn before each layer. I slowly build up the colors, filling in the light spots as I go- creating a yarn that is cohesive in the chaos of all the color layering. So while each yarn looks different side by side, when you work with them, particularly when you’re alternating skeins, you get a complex fabric filled with colors with minimal to no pooling. 

Often times when customers buy a sweater lot of a colorway like season of the witch, they will isolate the one skein that looks the most different, and then at the end of their project they will be left with one skein that maybe has more blue than the others, and it will in fact look slightly different. Resist that urge! Instead work two skeins that look different into your project, by alternating skeins, and therefore creating a cohesive fabric. I do this by alternating every two rows, I find that is the least disruptive and easiest way to alternate skeins, but by all means play around and find a technique that works best for you.

Back to my sweater, the reason it looks like I’m using two different colorways, is because for the start of my sweater yoke I took the skein with the most blue and the skein with the most orange and I am alternating them, using one skein, and in the case, alternating every row. You really don’t have to do anything special, you just pick up one stand of season of the witch and do a row of 1x1 colorwork with the latte, and then at the beginning of the next round, let go of the strand of season of the witch you were working with, pick up the other strand, and do another row of 1x1 colorwork with the latte. And just continue on that pattern throughout the sweater, joining a new skein as you run out of yarn. 

If you’re not used to alternating skeins of yarn while you work, this can seem intimidating, but I promise you, just give it a try and you will quickly see that it is not any harder than just knitting  with one skein at once and you will be amazed at how much it improves your fabric when working with hand dyed yarn!

Now, there is one other detail that we need to cover about my Sea Glass Sweater- and that is how I modified the pattern for only two colorways. Since the pattern is originally designed to work 2 DIFFERENT colorways every single row, I needed to insure that the two color version would alternate naturally every single row to create this checkered effect. And I needed to make sure that was true even on increase rows so that the increases remain hidden within the pattern, as the original design intended.

This sweater is a seamless, top-down in the round sweater, so the increases in the yoke a worked evenly around the sweater and increase in intervals. In the pattern you place stitch markers around the yoke at all the increase points for your intended size, the increases are then worked one of each side of the stitch marker. To ensure that my color pattern remained throughout increase rows, I worked the increases as the pattern indicates, but in two rows instead of one. I did the kfb before the stitch marker and skipped the second kfb.

On the second row, I pulled up a new stitch in pattern by grabbing that bar the kfb makes (see the picture above), while remaining in the established color pattern. So if the bar from the kfb in the first row was in season of the witch (as it is in the picture above), than I did the increase into that stitch using Latte.

This is how it looks after both increase rounds! I think it worked out perfectly didn’t require a lot of reworking the pattern. Just make sure you do one less row when working rows in between increases so you don’t end up with extra length in your yoke. 

Again, I think when you’re reading this, it sounds complicated, but I assure you once you get knitting, it will all make sense when you give it a go!

Other than that I didn’t have to modify this pattern to accommodate just two colors. In the pattern it is suggested to go up a needle size for the sleeves and I did take that note and go up to a size 8 since I was Vulcan Death Griping my size 16” needles.

There you have it my friends! My finished Sea Glass Sweater! Overall for me, this was not a difficult knit. I just was mindful about some details and it otherwise came together beautifully. I think if you’ve never done colorwork this is a great pattern to try because knitting two colorways at once in a 1x1 pattern is a really great way to practice and build up the muscle memory that will make any future colorwork projects a breeze. And the best part about this design is that there are now lots of different versions you can play with to practice, like the Sea Glass Hat or Sea Glass Cowl. If you love this and want to make it, I encourage you to jump in and give it a go, it’s ok to be a little intimidated about something, it usually just makes the finished project that much better in the end!

And by the way, I think this pattern would also be perfect for my other kettle dyed colorways like Rebel, Rebel, The Deep Dark Woods or Hydrangea or this month’s color of the month.  Let your imagination go wild- and of course if you need help making color pairings, just reach out!

Oh and one more thing, I knit the 5th size and used 4 skeins of Latte and 4 Skeins of Season of the Witch and had probably like 40 grams of each colorway left over at the end. I did shorten the body by about 2” because I intend to wear this with my Not Perfect Linen baby doll dress. Choosing how much yarn you’ll need is always tricky, but I think knowing what I used can help you decide what feels good for you, and always remember getting a little more than you’ll need is always the best idea. That being said, I always carry these two colorways and the nature of the design allows you to just grab a skein or two more if you need it! 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for following a long! This project was an absolute joy to knit and I love talking/writing about it just as much!

Happy Making!