A Cabled Beast: the Handsome Chris Pullover

Remember that mis-crossed cable from a few months ago? I will probably never forget, but it’s okay if you guys did.

Anyway.

BAM.

Check out that super-sexy-sitting-on-a-rock-in-95-degree-heat-on-the-Lakefront-in-New-Orleans-in-June-in-the-blinding-sun action, while your super-awesome Bob Ross socks steal the show, all for the love of a sweater. I am just that dedicated.

I mean, so good, right?

If anyone is not familiar, let me bring you up to speed. In 2019, a little movie came out called Knives Out that had some of the most wonderful modern costume design in recent memory. It especially charmed knitters and crafters with its proliferation of lovely handknits, in various states of care and disrepair, depending on the character, which leads us to this glory:

I mean, come on. The beauty that is Mr. Christopher Evans (whom, as we all know, I have a completely normal and totally rational undying love for) wearing an obviously lovingly-made and extremely skillfully-designed cabled fisherman’s sweater, complete with the holes and rips that his character, Ransom, would have completely not given two shits about. It’s a masterwork of costuming. The combination of the time-consuming handmade object with the neglect of the spoiled rich brat. So good. Every knitter who saw that movie can’t deny that they felt the profound hurt of seeing those holes, but also a deep, deep envy inside that could only be sated by making that sweater for themselves.

Luckily, an intrepid knitwear designer by the name of Caryn Shaffer took the time to reverse-engineer this cabled beast and put it out free into the the world for everyone to enjoy as the Handsome Chris Pullover pattern. (And I just saw that she has a sock pattern with the same patterning! Hooray!) It’s not a strictly-written pattern, more of a recipe that combines the design elements for different sizes (and it goes all the way up to 3XL, which is awesome) but leaves a lot of the tailoring and persnickety bits up to the maker.

It gives you all of individual cable patterns so that you can mix-and-match them as you like or play around with the spacings to get your perfect size and proportion of scale. It gives suggested lengths, but the repeats are easy enough to keep track of so that you can modify the length as you like, plus with a dropped-shoulder construction, you can easily modify sizing without messing up how the whole thing fits together.

Here are my pattern changes for my short and extremely square body, just in case you are also 5’3″ with linebacker shoulders and a need to have all of your sweaters cover the top half of your substantial rear end:

I used the sizing for the 48″ chest (the size marked as large). I used the cable pattern as written, but I first charted it all out for my size on its own separate graph paper, rather than attempting to switch between all of the printed pages every time the pattern changed.

That way, I had the whole thing transcribed with all of the elements together, and I could use my magnetic chart keeper to keep track of the rows. However, it can still be a little bit tricky due to the fact that each set of cables has a different row repeat (4 vs. 8 vs. 12 rows), but when the repeats were offset, I could use two different sets of magnets to help me.

I changed all ribbing lengths to be only 2″ (which was 14 rows in my personal gauge). I also knit the back to only 24 3/4″ long after 14 center panel repeats (rather than 26″ and 19 repeats, due to the aforementioned shortness and squariness of my personage). That put the neck shaping on the front piece at 21″, at the start of the 13th center panel repeat. Then, with the sleeves, I knit them two-at-a-time and only to 9 center panel repeats, again due to having super short arms. Just a lot of short squariness all around.

The yarn that I used was Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in worsted weight, in the color Fern (23433). With all of my modifications, that ended up being 19 skeins, or a little over 2000 yds. This stuff is heavy-duty, 100% Peruvian wool, ready for all of the cables that you can throw at it. With personal experience with the yarn in the past, I know that it does have the tendency to pill a little bit with extensive wear, but it’s so inexpensive and such a good value for the stitch definition and rustic fisherman sweater feel that you’re getting that it’s totally worth it to give it a little extra love and care now and then.

With this yarn, you can splice the strands together, so that there’s no end weaving-in, which was just a little stroke of genius that I had there. I can’t imagine finishing this and having to weave in the ends from 19 skeins into the cable pattern. I would have crumpled it up and shamed it in a corner until I was mentally ready, probably. Who knows, thought, because I’m so damn smart that I avoided the problem all together. Hooray, conceit!

The cables all blocked beautifully, as we knew they would. Then the seaming started.

And, can I tell you? It just feels really good to line up those cable elements right next to each other so perfectly.

A simple pleasure, but a powerful one.

When I finished the picked-up neckline ribbing, I was so excited I had to run into the bathroom and get a picture right away. And then ripped it off almost immediately because it is so freaking warm that I will no longer need a coat in the wintertime, whatever small amount of winter we have down here.

After it was fully steam-blocked, Dan and I braved the terribly oppressive June sunlight to get some pictures.

Bonus shot of what I look like attempting to gracefully exit the rocks, which you get as a present for making it this far into the post:

I am so proud of myself of sticking with this glorious monster for 4 months.

Cable after cable. Yarn splice after splice. Tender fingertips and the sheer massive weight of the thing on my lap for many, many nights. It was definitely worth it.

Disaster Averted

It was extremely tempting to title this post “god fucking dammit” because that’s what was coursing through my brain over and over. But, I wasn’t sure if swearing as much as I do in real life belonged in my titles? Just imagine a whole string of profanity in the background of this one.

So, here is my current project, the Handsome Chris Pullover, a delightful little (little?! ha!) bit of intense cabling nonsense created by the fabulous Caryn Shaffer. As those eagle-eyed among you can tell, it’s a lovingly reverse-engineered version of Ransom’s sweater from Knives Out, a sweater that I instantly fell in love with (along with every other knitter on Earth) when I saw that movie. Doesn’t hurt that my undying love for Chris Evans still burns as well, yes?

Anyway, it has been just a joy to knit. The cable patterns all have different repeat rates, and the overall look is so balanced and pleasing. It brings me fiddly knitting joy nearly every day.

However.

Sometimes things go wrong, and I am able to feel the universe shift within 2 seconds of making a mistake. This time, something went wrong, and I kept on blissfully knitting for several more inches, none the wiser.

Until I saw it of course, and then I went on knitting really, really angrily for a few more rows until I decided what to do. You all can see this mismatched cable cross, right? That outer left strand is supposed to cross under the oncoming strand, not over. Dan argued with me that it was barely noticeable, especially where it was located, which would be high up on the left shoulder. I argued that if I left it that way, which I was sorely tempted to do by sheer laziness and the fact that the mistake was on a panel only 1 stitch in from the edge of the garment, that I would be tormented by it for the rest of my life.

It’s not surprising who won that argument, is it? I am so freaking anal retentive about most things, but knitting most of all, so it comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that I stopped my angry knitting to angrily drop some stitches and angrily cable them right back up.

I placed that stitch marker on the incorrect cable cross, then dropped the stitches off the needle…

…and unraveled the whole cable portion all the way down, keeping the last edge stitch intact.

I kept each line as it was unraveling in order in my hand, as I was fearful that they would somehow tangle up, but I needn’t have worried. The yarn I’m using here is Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, which is a workhorse-and-a-half of a wool yarn and extremely sturdy. No tangling here.

After the section was unraveled to the problem area, I slipped that last stitch off the needle and held it on the stitch marker. If this section had been directly on the edge, involving that last stitch, I honestly don’t know what I would have done, because I’ve never tried to fix a dropped edge stitch. If anyone ever has, please let me know about the magic of your ways, because it seems downright impossible.

I threaded the dropped stitches onto another circular needle, the next size down, just to help with ease of threading. Then I proceeded to re-knit the entire section, with the proper cable twists, on those smaller needles, trying to not pull too hard so that the stitches remained even, ever so often tugging on the work horizontally and diagonally to ensure that the tension wasn’t getting too wonky with the smaller needles.

Knitting in this way is pretty strange, as with every row, you are constantly running out of yarn until you have a mere centimeter for the final stitch. At the end of that first row, I just slid the circular needle all the way back over, and I did the wrong side rows as though they were on the right side, which was pretty simple for this particular pattern since there are no cable crosses on the back.

I just kept working each row like that, following the chart, right-side versions only and sliding the needle over each time, like the fanciest i-cord ever, working each unraveled bit of sweater back into place in order, grumbling the entire time.

And then, suddenly, it was done. I put the edge stitch back on the needle, finished the last row in the traditional way, and gave it a few more tugs to even out the tension before calling it a day. And I’m so glad that I did, because I doubt that I would have ever been able to wear that sweater without pointing out the mistake to every person and animal that came across me. I would have felt it burning a hole of shame into my left shoulder for all of eternity. Now, just to finish the damn thing with approximately eleventy billion more cable twists to go. It’s so worth it.

Thankful for Pie – Inevitable 2020 Bright-Side Edition

Well, we knew we’d be here soon, right? Trying to find the bright side of this utter garbage situation of a year?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t have high hopes going through my photos this year, thinking that there wasn’t going to be much for my to post. But, as usual, my inner grump was definitely overshadowing the brighter bits. And one of the brighter bits this year…as always…was pie.

I mean, could we even have doubted it?

Just baked goods in general, really.

There is no way that I am not honest enough with myself to admit that baking and cooking were a large part of my ability to make it through this year.

Because when everything seems completely out of your control, doing something, however small, that makes you feel slightly productive and useful and moderately talented? Well, that’s the best feeling you could hope for.

So, along with our own gardening, and a little assist from our favorite farm at Grow Dat, Dan and I scraped together the trappings of a normal life for ourselves when we could.

I even baked cookies and Express-mailed them to my best friend in California. Like you do.

We listened to so much vinyl, and mourned lost heroes.

We ate lots of dinners outside.

We grew flowers.

And obscenely large zucchini.

We played catch and watched a lot of sunsets.

We cooked more than we ever have before.

We puzzled.

We loved up on our precious cat babies.

And each other.

We wore masks. (Courtesy of the always amazing Carlaesthetics.)

We made friends.

I started myself on a minor stationery and fountain pen obsession.

I learned how to can, and started pickling nearly everything in sight.

Throughout all of this cooking and baking and canning and loving each other nonsense, there were two other things that I did. Number one?

I graduated with my Doctorate of Nursing Practice Degree, successfully defending my scholarly project on Zoom. I’ve also since presented my DNP project at two separate local nursing conferences, and I was accepted to do a poster presentation at the Society of Pediatric Nurses at their annual conference in April.

After graduating, I studied my ass off for one last time.

And I passed my AANP FNP exam with room to spare.

I’ve been working as an NP in a school-based clinic system since the end of October, so my days look a little bit more like this now. COVID testing has become a major life skill.

The other main storyline, you ask?

KNITTING.

Just kidding! I didn’t make these, but I did buy the pattern book because it was only $1.50, and it is GLORIOUS.

This has been, hands-down, the most productive knitting year of my entire life, and instead of analyzing the reasons for that too hard (depression, pandemic, unemployment, blah blah blah), let’s just revel in the good shit, yes? The Stacy Pullover, which I recently got a chance to wear for the first time around Christmas, and it was just as perfect as it could be.

Then came the Sockpocalypse! Here’s all ten pairs, right in a row: Waving Lace Socks.

Go with the Flow Socks.

Hot Tiki Flamingo Ribs (arguably the ones with the best name).

Shadow Braid Socks.

Mountain Retro Ribs.

Yarn Chicken Pomatomus (definitely the knitterliest, and the ones with the best story).

Mirkwood Socks.

Raspberry Latte Lace.

Earthbound (my first ever foray into toe-up sock knitting!).

And finally, the Finale Helix Socks.

And because my friends are some of the very best people in the world, I got sent back a lot of love and very sweet presents from Sockpocalypse recipients. I choose to interpret these as hugs from far away, and they definitely kept me going when seeing my friends was simply not an option.

But wait, the knitting’s not over yet! I finally finished up some long-forgotten UFOs from the past. The Scotland Silk Felt Scarf.

And the 776-Weekend Lace-Edge Pillowcases, which had eluded me for 12 and 15 years respectively.

I fixed a lot of things that needed fixing.

I stress-knitted a beret because a hurricane — actually, many hurricanes were coming.

I made myself the craft room of my dreams and tried to inhabit, however ineptly, my grandmother’s shadow.

I made the most adorable sweater and panda set for the best baby around.

And because I wasn’t nearly satisfied enough with the Sockpocalypse, apparently, I made SEVEN MORE PAIRS pairs of socks and slippers.

Because I am a maniac. (Honeycomb Socks and Holiday Family Mukluks, of course.)

I am being absolutely serious when I say that knitting saved my life this year. Whenever I felt like a completely useless human, which was pretty much always, I could at least tell myself that I was always making something. Maybe not the most important thing or the most beautiful thing, but I was making something that would be able to bring just a little bit of light and happiness and warmth into someone else’s life. And although those contributions were small, they made me feel like I had a purpose when I was adrift.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t still feel that way. Even though school is done and I found a job, and I’m making my tiny mark in helping people during this utterly shit situation, I still feel empty and rudderless most of the time. I think that after so much death and loss of hope, it’s only normal to feel numb, isn’t it?

But, with that sentiment comes the very true and honest wish that I have that we will all take this time to build a new year for ourselves that’s filled with a little more kindness, a little more insight, a little more responsibility to each other. A little more light-bringing and a little less selfishness. And a whole lot more knitting.

Knitting Through – the Stacy Pullover

At the start of the new year, I realized that it had been 10 (ten!) years since I had last knitted a full-body garment for myself. Sure, I had made approximately eighty million hats and pairs of socks, but nothing to cover the top half of me since we moved from Boulder.

I’ll be honest, part of this is because I am not such a huge fan of the top half of my body. I am a big girl with short legs and broad shoulders, not exactly the ideal for the body-hugging fabric that knitting produces. Knitting smaller things for myself was always more acceptable because I didn’t have to take a bust or waist measurement to make them.

At the start of 2020, before the madness began, I said to myself, screw that. It’s the last semester of school, you’re coasting right to the finish line. You need a simple stress reliever project that you can feel good about! You scored a decent amount of this lovely worsted yarn during a clearance sale that is begging to become something lovely. You’ve got this!

Well, I was right about the yarn, and wrong about pretty much everything else.

My last semester of DNP school turned out to be anything but a coast to the finish line. I got a whole new faculty chair, who had a whole lot of things to say about my project that forced me to do a crazy amount of work in a short amount of time. The pandemic shut down school, shut down clinicals, and shut down our DNP project defense presentations. Instead, we did everything online, and I tried to boil down years of crazy hard work into a 25 minute slideshow where I talked way too fast but miraculously passed.

I didn’t get to finish clinicals or get a graduation. I got an award, but my family didn’t get to see me receive it. I rarely get to work at all, because my PRN status means that I get cancelled a lot to save money for the hospital. I gained even more weight because of…well because of everything. I tried to stay calm and bake and try to cook new things and knit, but inside I’m a simmering pot of anxiety. Never have I ever felt that I have less to be proud of, even though my brain knows better.

However, through it all, I made this sweater.

This sweater kept me looking forward.

This sweater gave me concrete goals.

This sweater made me really care about matching up the gradient on the sleeves, and then matching it to the front panels, which is no small feat, I must say.

This sweater made me happy when nothing else could, and I am thankful that the person I was in January gave me the gift of being able to finish it now.

Now, enough mushiness, let’s hear about the knitting!

The yarn is Cascade Tangier in the sadly discontinued colorway Lakeside. It’s a very strange blend of silk, acrylic, rayon, and cotton that resembles a slubby wool blend like Noro Kureyon, but with better stitch definition and a smoother drape. Some of the rayon sheds while you’re working with it and mine inexplicably had some random tiny bits of gold sparkly stuff in it, but otherwise it was very nice to work with.

The pattern is the Stacy Pullover from Big Girl Knits, designed by Terri Shea.

I have owned this book for so long and never knit anything out of it. Not sure why, as it is the perfect book for analyzing the fundamentals of knitted objects and how to make them work best for your body. Every pattern is labelled with the body feature that it is best suited for, plus there are a ton of helpful notes on how to modify things to your specific tastes.

The Stacy Pullover is specifically designed for people with a lot of boobs and butt to spare, so there was very little I needed to do to make it work for me. The only modification that I made was giving the ribbing an extra two inches, as I can’t stand it when sweaters are too short.

I didn’t even try to match striping on the front and back, because nobody has that kind of time and gradient yarns always manage to have knots in inopportune areas. However, I knit both of the sleeves at the same time, and made sure to make those match each other and line up with the armscye from the front, just to keep it from looking like too much of a circus.

I’m in love with the detached keyhole neck detail as well. That, combined with the fact that the transition from honeycomb to ribbing makes it look like a tailored waist, man that’s some good stuff.

As soon as the world calms down and the weather drops below 80 degrees everyday, this sweater will be joining me frequently, reminding me that I have something to be proud of despite all of the insanity. I have a doctorate. And I have a sweater. It’s all going to be okay.

Catch-Up Time, the Last: a Plethora of Kimono

Here it is, our last catch-up post for the fall and winter of 2019.

You remember my dear friends Jonathan and Rebecca? Of course you do. Just last year, I knit them some socks to keep them warm during their cold Bay Area nights.  This summer, I got the exciting news that they, too, were expecting a baby, although she wasn’t due until at least January.

Now, I don’t know if I’ve fully explained just how important these people are to me on here before. Jonathan is my oldest friend. I know that we all have people that we follow on Facebook and check in with occasionally from elementary school and high school, and of course we consider them friends, but Jonathan is the friend who has always been a major part of my life, despite multiple moves and life shifts by the both of us all across the country over the past 22 (is it 22?!) years.

I was sitting here trying to figure out how to sum up how we became friends and stayed close all of these years, but really, it’s not necessary. Just know that he has shaped who I am today and that I love him dearly. Rebecca makes him sublimely happy, and she accepted me and embraced me immediately when we first met, so she deserves the world.

So, as you can see, this baby coming into the world of two of my very favorite people was a big deal. So big that only one knitted item wasn’t going to be nearly enough to show just how happy I was for them.

And so we have here, a plethora of kimono.

When I told Dan about the baby, he said, “Oh, you need to make one of those baby sweaters that you made for Dani that time.” He was talking about when my friend Dani in Colorado was expecting for the first time, and I made her two little sweaters, based on the fantastic pattern One-Piece Baby Kimono by Cristina Shiffman, part of the seminal classic knitting book, Mason-Dixon Knitting. At the time when I made those sweaters (here and here, if you want to see how cute they were!), Mason-Dixon Knitting was still a relatively new blog/phenomenon. I was delighted to find out that they are still going strong, now selling their own beautiful yarns and pattern kits.

However, sometimes it just doesn’t get any better than the classics.

In this case, I went with my own stockinette-based tweak of the pattern. When you modify the pattern so that you do it this way, you can get a whole sweater out of only one ball of Cascade 220 Superwash, my very favorite yarn for baby stuff, plus it just looks super chic and elegant this way, yes?

Yes.

After you knit one, which seriously only takes an afternoon if you’re motivated, you can’t help yourself and need to keep going.

And going.

And going.

They are just too much cuteness. You can only really consider stopping after five.

The colors I chose, in descending order here, are Cascade 220 Superwash in #1946 Silver Grey, #873 Extra Creme Cafe, #905 Celery, and #1949 Lavender, and Berroco Vintage in #5101 for the white.

Dan picked out the ribbon colors, and I think he did a wonderful job. They are all 1/2″ satin ribbon from Offray, and there are so many colors out there, you’re bound to find a great match.

Weaving and sewing in the ribbon is a particular bit of fiddly business that I enjoy. In the original pattern, they only recommend sewing in the ribbon in ties on the side.

I can’t ever help myself, and I always have to go a little bit further. For mine, I wove the ribbon in and out of the eyelets, skipping two bars on top and one on the bottom. If you try to just weave it in-and-out of each hole, this width of ribbon starts to crumple and fold over in an unattractive way. By skipping holes on the top to create a larger “bump,” everything lays flat and lovely and shiny.

See?

After these were blocked and be-ribboned, they got sent off to San Rafael with all my love, just a few weeks ago. I’m glad I sent them early, because Jonathan and Rebecca’s birthday baby girl decided to come over a month early! She is perfect and beautiful, and I hope that she understands just how much she is loved, not just by her amazing parents, but by those of us across the country, sending our love and good wishes and warmth in the form of teeny, tiny handknit sweaters.

—–

So that just about wraps it up for this fall and winter. I am still exhausted, mostly in the brain area, but taking the time to sit and write these out has helped me to see how much I accomplished this year that wasn’t just assigned to me by professors.

In real life, I am a fairly prickly person. I am slow to friendship. I am exacting and organized and suspicious. Those people around me, the ones who love and care, deserve so much more love and appreciation than I am ever able to fully present with just words. So, I make things with my hands. I try to infuse the good thoughts and warm feelings that lurk deep within so that they can see them, finally, on the surface. And I hope that they understand.

Chocolate Pie & a Warm Pup – the City Stripes Dog Sweater

In early January, my friend Kelli had a wonderful idea. We decided to chase our winter blues away and celebrate the tiny amount of time I had left before my semester started again by baking chocolate fudge pie.

This girl right here is just full of good ideas. If it’s any indication of just how good of an idea this was, this is the first real opportunity that I’m having to post about it because of school and work and nonsense, despite the fact that it happened 3 months ago.

We took the chilly day as an opportunity to learn the finer points of pie crust-making, focusing on proper rolling and fluting technique, which are the fiddliest and best parts, of course.

Such concentration!

It was worth it.

Look at that pie-making pride! Well-deserved, indeed.

I don’t really have a recipe or anything to share, just wanted to brag a little bit about how freaking delicious that pie was. However, during our pie-making, Kelli and I were bemoaning how cold it was this winter, and we got onto the topic of dog sweaters.

Kelli is the greatest dog lover that I know, and that’s really saying something. She loves all pups, especially her tiny Ellie, and we spent part of the afternoon brainstorming on Ravelry what new sweater I would knit for her in order to keep warm during the rest of the winter.

I have never knit an article of clothing for an animal before, primarily due to two facts. One, I am allergic to dogs and cannot spend much time around them without dissolving into a sneezing, wheezy mess. Two, I own two cats, both of which have a history of handily annihilating any object placed on their person, except for a collar. (And even then, only select collars.)

We settled on Lion Brand’s City Stripes Dog Sweater pattern after falling in love with its stripey, squishy goodness, plus the fact that it has a wide range of sizes and fit modifications built into the pattern.

I am not normally a huge Lion Brand fan, but Wool-Ease Thick & Quick can be downright delightful when it’s combined with the right pattern.  Kelli told me that she wanted neutrals, blues, and golds, and I think I hit the jackpot.  The colors we went with were Sky Blue (106), Mustard (158), and Barley (124), and when they’re striped up all nice, they remind me of a very fancy private school uniform.

Wool-Ease is soft and squishy and bouncy, perfect for making those stripes pop. I was quite enamored of the wrong side, as I often am. Knitters know, sometimes the wrong side, the inside, is prettier.

But the right side, hoo boy, it’s nice, too.

Plus, Wool-Ease is machine-washable, an essential element when knitting anything that’s going to spend the majority of its worn life just a few inches from the ground.

I pretty much followed the pattern exactly as written for the smallest size (the 18″ chest), due to Ellie being a very tiny pup. I carried all of the colors up the side, which all disappeared conveniently in the seaming.

The only change that I made was in the binding-off. I used a larger needle just for the bind-off rows on each piece (I’m pretty sure I used a size 17 for this, but, as usual, I neglected to write down this important information). When I bound the stitches with the original size 13 needles, it just seemed like it wasn’t stretchy enough to fit comfortably over the head of a squirming animal. Redoing it with the larger needle size made it nice and stretchy without deforming the overall shape. I decided to try it out on the most unwilling participant I could find, just to be sure.

Trip tolerated it for a whole 5 seconds before deciding that both it and I needed to be destroyed. I’m pretty sure that that solidified my #1 place on his future hit-list, but he looked so cute I couldn’t resist.

But how did it go with Ellie?

Awwwwwww.

Such a warm and cosy pup.

Now that the weather’s gotten warmer, and it actually feels like spring around here (which feels more like summer to everyone else in the country), I know that Kelli and Ellie don’t need their sweater as much, but I have faith that it’ll last them for a long time to come. As for me, it is very tempting to use the 1/2 skeins I have left of each color to make a kitty sweater, but I think I’ll take the safe option and make a blanket for them to destroy. They’ll love it.

A Very Tiny Post about a Very Tiny Sweater (with a very long name) – the Super Simple Buddy Balls Bear Sweater

Remember that last post when I talked about making a little bitty sweater for a funny stuffed bear? Well, I decided to write out a really quick pattern for it, just in case anyone else is struggling to make a sweater for the very cool, but strangely proportioned, Buddy Balls bear plushies.

Maybe you’d like to get one of your own? There you go.

Here’s the pattern in an easily printable PDF for your toy-knitting enjoyment.

This tiny sweater was made with the lovely, yet sadly discontinued, Naturally Merino Fine 10 ply, but any slightly-lighter-weight worsted wool or wool-blend will do. Now, go make some tiny sweater for bears with giant heads. It’ll be fun, I promise.