Wool and Pine has been on my radar since the beginning, I love the way their patterns use color and texture to create beautiful knitwear pieces. It’s also hard not to love their body positivity and inclusivity model of designing. Despite my enthusiasm and owning one of their patterns, I had yet to sit down and actually create one of their designs. Some of this was knowing that we were trying for a baby and I didn’t want to make a garment that would never fit and some of this was having a queue of knits already in the works. Either way, I quickly added their Minis Collection to my queue and have loosely decided to work my way through the book.

The first pattern I started with was Sorrel Mini. I thought it would look super cute in a skein of madelinetosh TML + TWEED in Madonna from my stash (I was right!) and I have almost enough of a sweater quantity to make myself a larger DK version if I liked working the pattern. After finding gauge with a US size 2, I enthusiastically cast on size 6-12 months and worked my way through the yoke and down to the body of the sweater.

This is a very silly observation to bring to the table because it should have been obvious to me just by looking at the sweater, but Sorrel is a lot of purling. In fact, the entire sweater minus the yoke and ribbing is worked in reverse stockinette. While it looks gorgeous, I had to pay a bit more attention to my stitches and the little sweater seemed to take longer due to my speed when purling vs knitting. That’s really my only complaint about the little sweater, and it’s not really a fair complaint to make because I should have noticed it going in!

To compensate or rather to take a break from purling, I ended up knitting the sleeves inside out. While this mentally solved the problem, it did change my gauge a little bit. The sleeve stitches are a little bit looser than the body stitches (baby doesn’t care!), so if I do end up making a DK version for myself that’s something I’ll need to keep in mind. The other modification that I made to the pattern was to knit the sleeves 6 inches with 1 inch of ribbing instead of 5 inches with two inches of ribbing. I have a feeling the longer cuff was used with the idea that it could be folded over, but my preference is to fold the ribbing over onto stockinette on little sweaters.

Since I don’t usually work with single ply yarn, I wanted to take a minute to note that I enjoyed working with the skein of TML + Tweed that I picked up from my local yarn store. It was a little bit of an impulse buy, but seeing as I was eyeing the skeins during our craft night it’s safe to say that there are more skeins in my future.