​Brocken Spectre is due for release next week! It’s a luxuriously soft cardigan with a stunning stitch pattern at the shoulders. Holding a strand of merino and silk 4ply yarn together with alpaca and silk blend laceweight yarn gives unsurpassed softness and a subtle shine. This works perfectly with both the open, airy lace pattern and simple stocking stitch.
 
A Brocken Spectre is an optical illusion that you sometimes see on foggy mountaintops – your own enormous shadow in the mist with a rainbow halo. I’ve only seen one once! The zigzag of the lace pattern over the stocking stitch reminded me of misty mountaintops

Spring Snowfall is finally here! A gorgeous top down, cabled sweater with a yoked construction. Striking cables look great with this five colour fade in DK yarn from Black Elephant Yarns, and would look lovely in a single colour too. There are instructions for nine sizes with two options for body length. It's seamless, worked in the round, with a little short row shaping in the yoke for the perfect fit.

And it's available at a 50% discount with coupon code SNOWFALL50, valid until midnight (GMT) on 23rd September.

I will never get bored of narrow, twisted stitch cables on a background of reverse stocking stitch, they look so good with any yarn. Even funky multicoloured yarns that look fab in the skein, but a bit rainbow-vomit when knitted up look great in this stitch. There are instructions on which row to change colours based on a five colour fade, so no guesswork involved.​

And here's the nitty gritty on construction method, materials, techniques, etc...

Construction
We work from the top down using a yoked construction. The cabled patterns have increases built in which are worked down to the underarm. Short rows are worked at the lower back yoke for an improved fit and extra stitches are cast on at the underarm. We work body stitches down to the hem with options for different body lengths, then work sleeve stitches down to the cuff.
 
Suggested Yarn:  Black Elephant Yarns Winter Fade DK
5 x 115g skeins 100% superwash merino 230m/251 yds
 
Total Meterage (Cropped Version): (575, 625, 640) [855, 900, 945] {1130, 1170, 1210} m
Total Meterage (Full Length Version): (680, 745, 800) [1000, 1060, 1115] {1315, 1375, 1465} m
Total Yardage (Cropped Version): (625, 680, 700) [930, 985, 1030] {1235, 1280, 1320} yds
Total Yardage (Full Length Version): (745, 810, 875) [1095, 1160, 1220] {1440, 1500, 1600} yds
 
Dimensions (Metric):
Chest Circumference: (77.5, 87.5, 97.5) [107.5, 117.5, 127.5] {137.5, 147.5, 157.5} cm
Yoke Depth: (19, 21, 22.5) [24, 25, 26] {27.5, 29, 30} cm
Length Underarm to Hem (Cropped Version): (34, 32.5, 30) [36, 35, 34] {37.5, 36, 35} cm
Length Underarm to Hem (Full Length Version): (40, 39, 37.5) [42.5, 41, 40] {44, 42.5, 42.5} cm
Upper Sleeve Circumference: (26, 29, 31) [35, 37.5, 40] {44, 46, 49} cm
Sleeve Length from Underarm: (44, 42.5, 47.5) [46, 45, 44] {47.5, 46, 45} cm
 
Dimensions (Imperial):
Chest Circumference: (31, 35, 39) [43, 47, 51] {55, 59, 63}”
Yoke Depth: (7½, 8½, 9) [9½, 10, 10½] {11, 11½, 12}”
Length Underarm to Hem (Cropped Version): (13½, 13, 12) [14½, 14, 13½] {15, 14½, 14}”
Length Underarm to Hem (Full Length Version): (16, 15½, 15) [17, 16½, 16] {17½, 17, 17}”
Upper Sleeve Circumference: (10½, 11½, 12½) [14, 15, 16] {17½, 18½, 19½}”
Sleeve Length from Underarm: (17½, 17, 19) [18½, 18, 17½] {19, 18½, 18}”
 
Needles: 4.5 mm/US 7 75 cm/30” circular needle or as required to achieve correct gauge.
 
Gauge: 18 sts and 28 rows = 10 cm/4” in stocking stitch after blocking.
 
Extras: Tapestry needle for weaving in loose ends, cable needle, clip type stitch markers, holder or waste yarn for holding stitches, you may find a row counter useful.
 
Pattern Difficulty: Moderate to fiddly. There are separate instructions for multiple sizes included in many of the lines of the pattern. I’ve tried to make this as clear as possible, but it is a complicated pattern.
 
Skills Required: Work flat and in the round; knit and purl; knit into back loops, cast on and bind off; knitted and purled increases and decreases, including knitting into back loops. Cable knitting including knitting into back loops, pick up and knit (instructions given), work short rows (instructions given).

Two new patterns are in the works, with a little bit of luck these will be released in October and November. Although with a five month old baby at home, delays are to be expected! 

I'm going a bit girly-girly for winter. Brocken Spectre is a super fluffy cardigan with a delicate lace pattern at the shoulders. It's knitted up with a 4ply silk blend and laceweight alpaca held together for an extra cozy, fuzzy, knitted hug. Goldenacre Cardigan is knitted up in a twisted slip stitch rib pattern, designed to look like brioche lace. It's got saddle shoulders for continuous lace from neckline to cuffs and an attached shawl collar for toastiness. Let nobody say I didn't prioritise toastiness. 

Aaaand, one last look at how stunning these cables are!

We're having a little mini sale to celebrate Valentine's Day! Our three most heart filled patterns are half price with coupon code VALENTINE24.

Here's a wee description of each of the patterns..... 

Loveheart Crop is a super cute cropped tee with little "double nupps" that look just like hearts. It's a yoked top, but worked from the bottom up (so the hearts aren't upside down!) There are nine sizes to keep things inclusive, and it's the perfect Spring knit in 4ply yarn.

Rather than lace, this time the hearts are stranded colourwork. Fairisle Hearts is a top down, seamless yoked sweater with a classic fairisle design. Just like Loveheart Crop, there are nine sizes to choose from.

Another fairisle design, my Alpinist Hot Water Bottle Cozy is incredibly quick to knit in super chunky yarn. Always a great option for gift knitting, a true heartwarmer!

My new pattern, Crosshill Cardigan, is live! It's a top down, seamless waterfall cardigan designed for miniskeins (but still beautiful in a single colour). The main colour is Mulberino Yak 4ply in navy and the contrast colours are a set of Mulberino Shfades, both from Orchidean Luxury Yarns.  The cardi comes in nine sizes, to fit chests approximately 28-60". It's open at the front so there's a bit of leeway between sizes. 

The cardigan is worked from the top down using a modified raglan construction before splitting for the sleeves and body at the underarm. The body is worked down to the hem before picking up the sleeves stitches and working down to the cuff. We work a series of eight bands of lace from top to bottom, these could be worked in eight different colours, maybe one contrast colour, or the whole cardigan could be worked in a single colour.
 
And what's the inspiration behind the name? Crosshill is the area in Glasgow where my parents stay, and a firm favourite of my daughter. This makes it one of the few places where I’m able to get any knitting done while she’s awake!
​

For my upcoming pattern, Goldenacre Cardigan, I really wanted the lace pattern to run all the way from the neckline down to the cuffs of the sleeves. To my mind, the best way to do this is using a Saddle Shoulder construction. In this post, I'll give details on how to knit a top down, saddle shoulder cardigan.

Here's a diagram showing how the upper body is put together, we go through each part step by step below.  In my Goldenacre Cardigan pattern, obviously there are all the exact stitch counts and patterns, but here we just give an overview.

1 and 2: work strips of lace (or whatever pattern you're using!) for the left and right saddle shoulders. These will go along the shoulder from the neckline to the top of the sleeve. I made mine quite long for a drop shoulder.

And that's it! It ends up looking something like this:​

And here's a wee sneak peek at how the finished cardigan looks - it should be out for test knitting soon. Follow @littletheorem on instagram or twitter for the test call!

Arnprior is live! This super cosy cardigan is the perfect "quick to knit" pattern for winter wear. Living on Scotland's seemingly permanently cold and rainy west coast sometimes it seems like winter will never end, this is a great one to knit when you need something toasty and you don't want to spend a month knitting it! The simple but stunning lace pattern looks great at shoulders and cuffs,  and the twisted ribbing adds interest to an otherwise easy stocking stitch knit.

Arnprior Farm becomes a fabulous pumpkin patch in the Autumn and is a firm favourite of my daughter. This cardigan is so quick to knit that I managed to finish the bulk of it on the drive to and from Arnprior this year. The beautiful pink and orange tones of the yarn are perfectly reminiscent of sweet treats at the pumpkin patch.

The cardigan is knitted from the top down. We cast on stitches across the upper back and work down to the underarm, knitting the lace pattern as we go and working armhole shaping at the outside edges. Then stitches are picked up at each shoulder and worked down to the underarm, with armhole shaping to match the back and increases at the inside edge too. There's a little twisted rib edging at the inside edge to stop the fronts curling.

Then we work all stitches down to the hem, and pick up stitches round the armholes for the sleeves. Hem and cuffs are worked in twisted 1x1 rib, and there's another repeat of the lace pattern at the cuffs too.

We've tried to be as size inclusive as possible here, so there are 11 different sizes so hopefully everyone can pick a cardigan that fits. We include guidance on ease and instructions on how to change the sleeve length.

There's a schematic showing all measurements and a disgram showing how to work the upper body too.

I made a post on 1st Jan looking at trends for garment designs on Ravelry, so I thought I’d do a follow up for accessories. I really love looking at data and hope this is useful for my fellow knitwear designers as well as people just deciding what to knit next!

 I used Ravelry’s “hot right now” pattern search, filtered for accessories, only paid for patterns and “new to Ravelry”. I feel like free patterns skew the results – they’re not necessarily “hot” because of the pattern but because of the price tag! I included “new to Ravelry” this time as well. When I did my garment design trends post at the start of January I didn’t do this and I think I got a lot of patterns which have been at the top of Ravelry for months if not years, rather than reflecting current trends.

I only looked at the top 50, so this is more of a snapshot than a definitive study, but I think it gives a good picture of what’s popular right now.

There are definitely categories that I think I could break down further – knit and purl in particular covers a huge range of fabric types from simple stocking stitch to complex textured patterns. When I wrote the post analysing garment trends, I only included one fabric type per garment because there were so many other variables (fit, neckline, sleeve length, hem length….). For accessories, I only had a main category, then one layer of refinement – e.g. neckwear is the main category and that’s refined into scarf, triangular shawl, cowl etc. So I felt like I had more bandwidth to include more detail on the fabric type. I assigned two fabric types to each accessory (if required). This meant I could have e.g. lace and cables rather than picking the more prominent one. I also broke down colourwork into stranded, mosaic, stripes etc.

Broad Garment Types

• Neckwear 52%
  
• Headwear 52%
  
• Socks 18%
  
• Hands 6%
  
• Torso 4%
  

Yarn Weight

• 3ply 12%
  
• 4ply 30%
  
• Sport 12%
  
• DK 36%
  
• Worsted 2%
  
• Aran 4%
  
• Bulky 2%
  
• Super Bulky 2%
  

Fabric Type

• Colourwork 38%
  
• Knit and Purl 18%
  
• Lace 15%
  
• Cables 13%
  
• Textured 12%
  
• Brioche 3%
  

Colourwork Type

• Stranded 50%
  
• Stripes 20%
  
• Slip Stitch 15%
  
• Modular 10%
  
• Woven 5%
  

Number of Colours

• One 48%
  
• Two 34%
  
• Three 8%
  
• Four 4%
  
• Five plus 4%
  
• Choice 2%
  

• Neckwear
  
• Triangular Shawl 42%
• Cowl 23%
• Rectangular Shawl 8%
• Scarf 8%
• Neckerchief 8%
• Collar 8%
• Crescent Shawl 4%

Headwear

• Hat 60%
• Balaclava 20%
• Headband 20%

Torso

• Cape 50%
  
• Poncho 50%
  

Hands

• Fingerless Mitts 67%
  
• Mittens 33%
  

There were a lot more complex fabric types than I found in the garment trends -lots of colourwork, textured patterns, lace and cables. I think this must be because there’s such an abundance of free basic accessory patterns out there, if you’re going to pay for an accessory pattern, you want it to be something special. Whereas even basic sweaters are normally “pay for” – a lot of work goes into grading for multiple sizes and getting the fit right for even a stocking stitch sweater. Neckwear was most popular – this is always great for gifting, one size fits all, versatile in terms of what stitch patterns you can use or which weight of yarn.

The yarn weights that turned up most often were fingering and DK weight – these accounted for two thirds of all patterns. This is maybe a little surprising given the time of year – I do love aran and chunky weight accessories when it gets really chilly. I think it’s explained by the nature of the fabrics – lace and especially colourwork often work better with finer yarns. A chunky cowl with a stranded fairisle pattern might be simply too bulky to be comfortable. If I hadn’t filtered out free patterns I think there would be a lot more heavier weight yarns in simpler stitch patterns.

Colourwork is in! Over half of the patterns used more than one colour, and over a third used colourwork techniques (stranded colourworks, stripes, slip stitch, modular colourwork and woven knitting). The most popular colourwork technique was stranded colourwork by a large margin – fairisle is definitely on trend for Winter 23/24.
The three most popular categories, with each type making up 10% of the patterns surveyed, were:

Colourwork socks
Cabled/Textured Headwear
Colourwork Cowls
 
While neckwear is the most popular category overall, colourwork is definitely the most used fabric type. Since it’s easier to work colourwork in the round it makes sense for colourwork cowls to be so popular. The next two most popular categories, each at around 7% of patterns surveyed were:

Lace Socks
Lace Triangular Shawls

I wonder if this also ties in with the kind of yarn people were gifted – I know if I’m ever asked what yarn I’d like as a gift I ask for 4ply or laceweight since you only need one skein to make an accessory. Although I have been known to ask my parents for a sweater quantity of aran weight yarn, I wouldn’t ask anyone else to splash out potentially £100 on a gift! Then these lighter weight yarns lead to pattern sales for delicate lace designs. Just a thought!