I'm back with another lolodidit project - this time for the Q3 Summer Sweater KAL over on the lolodidit community site. To be honest, I had no idea how I was going to use the Divine Yak I had bought in the Little Darlin (light purple) colorway, so I started off by perusing patterns for DK weight yarn. DK isn't in my normal wheelhouse, so I had to do some research first.
This made me realize I was going to need more than the four skeins I originally bought, so I snagged another couple of Divine Yak skeins in Lanfear (black). Now I was able to narrow down my hunt to two-color patterns. As is typical for me, I was looking for inspiration that I could plug into a CustomFit recipe, since I tend to prefer a specific shape and construction for my sweaters.
I found the Cleary pattern on knitty, which I loved for the brioche on the shoulders, cuffs, and hem, but I really did not like the boxy shape of the sweater. So I decided that I would do my standard pieced and seamed sweater recipe, and I scoured my brioche stitch dictionary for a pattern I liked for the detail.
The first step was to swatch both stockinette for the body and the brioche stitch of my choice - Herringbone brioche - because I didn't have an existing CustomFit recipe for this yarn weight/gauge. I went down two sizes for my brioche swatch initially, but even that was too loose, so I ended up going down to a size a whole mm smaller than the stockinette - the stockinette uses US 6 (4.0mm) and the brioche uses US 2.5 (3.0mm).
All in all, this sweater took two weeks of a little less than 93 hours of knitting time. I was pretty singularly focused on this project over the last couple of weeks because the yarn was an absolute dream to work with and the pattern was so motivating! The DK weight yarn was a lot faster to work with than my normal fingering weight sweaters, and the Divine Yak is so beautiful. I have a little over half of skein of each color left over, so I budgeted my yarn beautifully as well. I'm very happy with how this project turned out!