The WIPdown // Illuminate

hello and welcome to another episode of the whip down the whip down is where i talk about my favorite work in progress or whip at the moment and it is brought to you by my lovely patrons over on patreon they see it first they have it for a while before i publish it over here on youtube and it's only possible from their support so a huge thank you to my patrons for supporting me and making this segment possible so if you are seeing this when i'm filming it i'm filming it august 1st i probably won't have this up on youtube for a few weeks but if you're following me on instagram i'm pretty sure you know what work in progress is my absolute favorite at the moment and that is the illuminate by andrea mowry so let's talk about it because i i'm gonna be honest with you i'm a huge andrea mowry fan i love almost every thing that she puts out like i want to knit it immediately there have been a few exceptions um and i usually come around on them and this is one of them so the illuminate takes spin cycle and magpie i forget what the base is called but they're mohair base might be called magpie glue glow hair no that's stephen west um i don't i don't know but i'll link both spin cycle and magpie in the description um and also the pattern in the description uh so you can check it out for yourself but i am a huge fan of spin cycle and i love magpie fibers but i have learned that i don't wear mohair it doesn't agree with me very well um we just have some issues it's not really comfortable against my skin i love it i love the texture it adds i love the glow that it adds the illumination if you will but it just doesn't agree with my skin it's not comfortable so what i've really fallen in love with is the surrey alpaca bases that dyers including myself have and for me it's called cloud so when i saw this i immediately like kind of put it out of my mind because i knew i just didn't want to knit it with the mohair and sometimes for me it's really hard to visualize a yarn substitution right away sometimes it just needs to marinate sometimes i need to think about it so i just kind of put it out of my mind and it's also the rhymeback 2021 sweater and i'm not going to rhyme back this year which is fine because i'm just not comfortable with it and i also don't have time to go this year um but i like there's just part of me that i was like oh i can't knit that i'm not going to ride back it's just like i just had these weird mental blocks that were put there only by me and so i really was just like yeah i'm just not going to hit that and then i was watching andrea mowry's videos on youtube she puts them out every friday it's called omnit if i want to and it was when she released illuminate and she was wearing it on the video and i saw how it was moving on her and the ease and just how great it looked and i was like you know what i do like that sweater i do like the silhouette it's very reminiscent of her pink velvet and her mackworth sweaters which i really love i knit both of those and i loved the way they fit me i love a circular yoke on my body so i decided right then and there that i was going to cast it on and lo and behold i had two skeins of spin cycle and i had two skeins of my cloud base and a collar that i thought would go well with the spin cycle so what i had was two skeins of spin cycle died in the wool breasted rainbow i bought these for the paige turner shawl and i hadn't cast it on yet i'm kind of glad i didn't because i really wanted it for the sweater so i've since bought a few more skeins so i could play with color management which i'll talk about in a second um so i've already knit most of the two skeins into the sweater and then my two skeins of eloise this is my eloise colorway on my cloud base which is surrey alpaca and silk so i cast on immediately like i didn't have the needles i wanted i didn't have anything so i purchased the needles i wanted but i cast it on using magic loop i did the fold over cup fold over neckline which is my personal favorite because i've had issues in the past um with a lot of designers but i've knit mostly injury mower patterns so i've noticed that i usually knit a size four or five in her patterns and it always is just a little further away from my neck than i would like it to be so i do the fold over neckline to bring it in and i did that on my pink velvet because i noticed it on my mac worth i was like oh this is just a little wider than i would like a sweater to be and when i decided i was going to knit pink velvet i was like i would like the sweater more if it was closer to my neck so i'm going to try this method and it worked so i have been doing fold over necks on most of my sweaters since then it just i think it looks really nice and it i really like how it brings it closer to my neck so i did that and then i just kept going i just kind of kept going so this is a size five it is a 48 inch bust that will give me about 6 inches of positive ease at the moment which is kind of my happy spot i like between 6 and 10 inches of positive ease and i really like the sweater i inhaled too much coffee um sometimes when i inhale and i'm talking really fast or talking more than i'm used to and i inhale it's just dry and then i just want to cough so i'm trying not to cough okay so it has this beautiful there are two charts so you have this chart with the chevron shapes and then you have this chart this chart and then you repeat the first chart and it is so so beautiful and this is the first sweater that i've knit the entire color work section with the same yarns in the same hands because some not going to lie to you sometimes if there are more of one color than the other i'll put the one where there are more stitches in my dominant hand which is my right and the color that has the least amount of stitches in my left it doesn't matter if it's the main color or the contrast that's what i do so for this sweater i knit the contrast color the cloud the surrey silk and eloise in my right hand my dominant hand and then i knit the spin cycle in my non-dominant hand my left hand and i really like the way that it came out and it looks really even i went up to a size us6 for the color work and i just decided i liked the fabric and kept knitting all the way down i have knit enough andrea mallory patterns and this i i feel like i shouldn't be saying this because i'm actually very pro swatch i think swatches are really important but i've knit enough andrea mowry patterns to know to always go up a needle size or two in the color work for me and then at least up one needle size from what she calls for for the body because i'm a tighter knitter so i did that and i really like it and it it's like i can tell it's the perfect size and then it's gonna block out really well so i've just i've knit enough of her patterns i did an entire year where i knit a new pattern every month from her i've knit a lot of her sweaters so i just like i know i know how my gauge versus her gauge is so that's why i felt comfortable not gage swatching and i also just really wanted to cast this on so let's talk about yeah i didn't do any modifications except for the neckline and that's really the only oh and surrey silk instead of mohair i am still holding the surrey silk double i'm pulling from the outside and the inside at the same time and that's working really well um those are the only modifications that i made was the base and the fold over neckline let's see let's talk about color so i love rusted rainbow it is one of my favorite spin cycle colors of all time i think it's so fun and beautiful and i'm really into the warmer earth tone colors right now really into burnt orange and mustard yellow and warmer pinks and i really just kind of wanted to showcase that in the sweater but occasionally you'll get brighter sections and i'm not a huge like red fan so i'm trying to keep the reds and the bright pinks um kind of at bay which is why i bought a few extra skeins of this colorway and i know i'm gonna use it i love it so much um but yeah so i really wanted to focus more on the oranges and the mustard yellows with an occasional like dark spot and an occasional bright spot and just kind of really balance it out so i'm really playing with the yarn i'm you i'm really kind of just letting the yarn do what it does but when i come to a spot that i don't particularly love i cut it out and i start again for example like this was too bright for me um so i just let it go and it was the end of a skein and i was like that's fine i'm just gonna start a new one um yeah so that's the color management um i'm really enjoying the darker barber pulley sections like this no i think it's really fun so i'm really hoping to get more of that towards the bottom especially in the hem as far as sleeve matching it's really hard with spin cycle because it's such a unique color changing yarn so i'm not going to be too picky about how just really try not to i'm sorry i'm gonna not be picky about how exact i can get the sleeves i'm going to try to keep them in the same ballpark if i can but we'll kind of play it by ear and see what happens um i bought three three skeins from spin cycle's website and i put in my notes it's on their website you can request um like they have a bunch of pictures on the side when you look at a colorway and you can kind of be like oh i really like the dye lot of picture three i like those colors and the skein so when i checked out i said i really like picture number seven of rusted rainbow it's much more mustardy yellow not a lot of green not a lot of bright spots that was like my note so i'm hoping that that works out and then i can kind of use those for the sleeve and maybe the hem because i think between these two i mean i will get the rest of the body out um yeah so i'm getting there um so yeah probably about two inches on the body and i'll probably go to about 10 inches on the body i'm really excited to wear this over dresses this fall and winter so that is the illuminae by andrea mowry thank you for checking out the whip down and thank you again to my patrons for making this video possible i will see you next time bye

Channel: Stacy Elstone

Views: 4,894

Rating: 4.8819189 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: rYBeAfwWhJA

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021