Pattern: R&R Hoodie by Tanis Lavallee
Yarn: TFA PureWash Worsted in Deep Sea/Ravine and lots of leftover bits of Green Label and a few other random bases as well.
Ravelry project pages here.
This gorgeous hoodie is the very first thing that I knit with the few sample skeins of PureWash Worsted that I got my hands on last year. Before committing to order boat loads of it and making it our new signature yarn line I had to pick the perfect test colour and the perfect test pattern to try it out with my own two needles. We decided to test a deep, saturated teal blue shade and I was immediately thrilled with how the yarn took the dye, success! For the pattern, I picked a favourite, my R&R Hoodie. To add a bit of personality to the knit and also to test out how our new PureWash would work with our old Green Label I added rainbow stripes using a whole bunch of leftover odds and ends of Green Label and to round out my rainbow I ended up using one or two colours of Orange Label and even Yellow Label leftovers. Bet you can't guess what colour stripe was knit using DK weight yarn!
Since announcing yesterday that PureWash DK and Worsted will be replacing Yellow Label and Green Label in our permanent collection I've gotten quite a few questions from knitters wondering how well the two bases work together. I guess there is a reason why it's taken me a year to blog about this sweater... because it's the perfect case study to answer that question for you all! The bases work together beautifully. They do feel slightly different, and they take the dye differently, but in stripes or colour work, you will have no trouble. They are both washable and are comparable gauges, care instructions are the same, it should be a very easy transition. I wouldn't try and combine Green Label with PureWash in the same colour for a large project (like if you already had 3 skeins of Green Label in Chestnut and decide to pick up 3 more skeins of PureWash Worsted in Chestnut to knit a sweater - you'd know that the two yarns were different since they take the dye differently) but for stripes or colourwork, the bases work beautifully together.
This sweater is, hands down, without a doubt, the most worn hand knit in our house at the moment. Chris and I have a few sweaters that we wear often, but none of us has worn a sweater as devoutly as Rowan has worn this beauty over the past year. For months, every single time he left the house he was wearing this hoodie under a puffy vest (sneak peek here and then again but with the boots! my favourite outfit), and then as it warmed up he dropped the puffy vest (proof here and here!), and then summer rolled around and we all forgot about it, but with the return of fall and crisp weather came the return of Rowan's favourite outfit (he even wore it on Halloween!). Needless to say, I am THRILLED by how much he loves it. I recently posted a photo of this sweater, freshly washed, after almost a year of very solid wear by a toddler to Instagram and I think that it's a very good example of how well the PureWash holds up with careful washing and the occasional Gleening.
And, just because we're on the topic of mixing bases, below is a shot of the Fly Away blanket I knit for the TFA Blanket KAL last summer. It's knit almost exclusively in PureWash DK with 2 colours of Yellow Label added in.
I plan on adding PureWash and removing Yellow Label and Green Label my the middle of next week - I've got a few more colours to photograph and a bit more admit work to do before then, but we're getting there!