My black sheep sweater is done! Ironically made with Brown Sheep Company wool, haha (more on that later). Overall very happy with the result, my most professional-looking knit to date. I adapted the Diana Black Sheep hand knitting pattern to the machine, and I also studied the available photos from Princess Diana and her sweaters for construction and patterning. I did fair isle for the sheep with a punch card. The knitting part was stressful, and the back panel did fall off the machine once where I couldn't recover. Shaping of the front panel while doing fair isle was a breeze on the first side that I did, but the second side nearly fell off the machine, it was extremely stressful knowing I couldn't recover from the back falling off, and this was a nearly completed front! Fortunately it worked out.
I latched up the red floats after the fact, and duplicate stitched the black sheep and the eyes. Initially I was going to latch up the white floats, but that was pulling the fabric on the front too much (where the floats are relatively short), and the sheep actually benefited more from latching the red floats as that kept the white part from separating on the front where the two colors meet. Even with the latching up, the floats are pretty bad and they do catch when putting it on. This is the biggest construction issue. I would like to learn to make this with jacquard. I'm also not really happy with how thick the black sheep looks with the duplicate stitch. Does anyone know how the original was made? On photos, it looks like the black sheep is part of the original fabric, not duplicate stitch. Between the seaming (what a nightmare to seam fair isle edges by hand!!) and the duplicate stitching, the hand finishing felt like an insane amount of work, definitely more hours than the knitting. I would have made a few different design choices now that I see the final product, but that's fairly minor.
Now the yarn is the biggest disappointment. The worst issue with it is that the red color wasn't colorfast, and when I washed the whole sweater for blocking, it stained the beautiful white sheep. Now they are slightly pink, and not even uniform. With yarn coming on cones, it's not something I can prewash like a skein... ugh. This wasn't a major issue when blocking my swatch, probably because the size of it was much smaller and hence less red dye coming off. The other issues were the knots, which there were ~3 of. I caught and removed two of them, but one made it into the sweater without me noticing. There was also thickness variability and some random white thread in the red yarn (pictured)?? The yarn does have a very nice feel to it though. To be seen how it wears. From just knowing it's not colorfast, I would have chosen a different yarn. Having these issues is kind of disappointing for a premium-priced yarn.
