I think a lot of us have had an experience where we’ve bought something or purchased a pattern and it turns out the brand or designer is not someone whose values align with our own. The Sunset Highway sweater was one of the big popular sweaters a few years ago, you’d see them everywhere at yarn shows or anywhere where knitters would congregate. I turned up at Perth 2018 with a plan. A list of yarns I had already chosen from the vendor previews, a coloured in version of the yoke, I had this grand vision of what my sweater would look like. I cast it on soon after and as it took shape on my needles I loved it. Towards the end of 2018 I got pregnant and I wore my beautiful Sunset Highway the whole way through it, like a cosy hug. I wore it to EYF 2019 and loved seeing the sea of them all in different colours. I used the leftover yarns in another project.
And then it became very clear that the designers values were not values I shared. I put my sweater away, I didn’t feel comfortable wearing it anymore. There wasn’t any way for me to access the rest of the yarn anymore so I didn’t want to lose the yarn by frogging it, but I also didn’t want to unravel months of work to make a big 4ply sweater either. It’s my favourite fitting sweater! So eventually I came up with a plan.
I designed a new yoke chart. I frogged the yoke! And I reknit it up. And oh, my goodness. I LOVE IT! It’s like a whole new sweater and I can wear it again knowing it won’t make me feel uncomfortable nor anyone else! The sleeves are still recognisable but the yoke it very different and I’m hoping that will show the intent to distance myself. In fact, I love the new yoke so much I’m considering actually making ANOTHER full sweater! And this time I’d alter the arms as I’m going too. Decisions….
I have christened this ‘new’ sweater the Sunset Byeway. If you want to make your own I’ve put instructions below. I needed some extra MC but the rest of the recovered yarn was enough.
1: Pick up your stitches. You’ll be picking up on the third round below the colourwork, so you have two rounds of plain stockinette to frog as well. Using the same size needle as you knit the body with, pick up the stitches across the full round. Trace down to find the start of the row and place a marker there on the row you’re picking up.
2: Start to frog. DO NOT FROG FROM THE TOP! I started by trying to cut the cast on and then frog down and it DID. NOT. WORK. Instead the easiest way I found was to find where I joined in the MC (purple in my pics, point A), undo the knot and then gently frog it down. You will need to pull it through stitches for a few rows before you can wind it into a ball but *trust me*, not as much as you’d need to the other way. Then when you’ve got to the final colourwork row, find where you fastened off CC1 (green in my pics, point B), undo the knot and unravel that final row. This should leave you with a yoke separate from the body. Frog the body down to the picked up stitches, then frog the yoke back from the bottom.
3: Knit! Follow the chart. / = k2tog, \ = ssk. Then you’ll need to reverse engineer the rest of the top for the size you knit. Replace increases with decreases. The short rows took me a little bit of figuring out but I basically drew a bunch of dots (to represent stitches), marked the longest short row point and then counted out where they would be and wrote them out. It took a bit but it wasn’t too hard. I added in an extra row to catch the last wraps (there will only be one on each side as you’re going shortest row to longest) and then also a plain row before starting the neck ribbing.
4: I would recommend maybe a few extra rows of ribbing on the neck as it will probably curl. I tried a few different stretchy cast offs before I found one I liked the look of (I ended up using icelandic cast off). Block and enjoy!
ramsay_baggins 