Blog on fiber arts
the dude
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
So we were watching The Big Lebowski with a group of friends when my husband said, “Hey, you should make that sweater.” Of course I responded that it would be easy, I could do it in no time. Everyone agreed that knitting the dude’s sweater would be pretty badass. Thus began the long process of knitting and ripping, knitting and ripping, that was to be my life for the next two months. If any of you have ever attempted to make this sweater, you may have an idea what I mean.
First, the overall stitch. The first conclusion is that it isn’t stockinette. It’s clearly much too textured for that. I looked hard for purl stitches in between, thinking it could be 1x1 rib, but really didn’t think I could see any of those. So, with input from some other knitters, I decided that it must be stockinette brioche. I started my first swatch, which turned out to be the first of oh-so-many.
The Dude in Cascade Yarns Ecological Wool (100% Wool; 478 yards/437 meters)
I worked a big section in stockinette brioche with the color patterns and all. It seemed about right, even though the stitches looked pretty sloppy, especially at color transitions. I decided to go with it anyway and cast on for the back. But it was really easy to make mistakes with the brioche and I had these spots that just looked bad. I got about halfway done with the back when I took it to knit nite to get some opinions. A couple of people suggested 1x1 rib, which I had really just dismissed at the beginning of the process. Everybody agreed that the brioche was pretty messy and we started leaning toward just doing it in stockinette. But really, it’s textured. That’s part of the whole spirit of the sweater. So I went ahead and swatched in 1x1 rib and behold! It was beautiful. It was much easier than the brioche and much neater. I abandoned my previous attempt and went all out with the rib. Surprisingly, the rib worked really well with the color patterns. I found that it helped even out the pull on the stranded color work because it’s so stretchy.
I knitted happily along and finished the back piece without much further trouble. That is, until I measured the back piece. It was ridiculously long. The problem was that I had been eyeballing the pattern and charting the color work so that it just looked like the original sweater. I hadn’t been keeping in mind the length measurement. Yes, I have now thoroughly learned my lesson. So, I did what I should have done in the first place, and allowed the chart a certain number of rows (34, if you’re curious) and then drew the pattern within those bounds. I ripped out half of the back to re-knit this, and it worked. I decided not to add armhole shaping to the back or front pieces because I thought that the design was fairly loose-fitting and really didn’t need it.
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On to the sleeves. Yes, I did an entire sleeve in a way that would not line up with the color panels on the rest of the sweater, and yes, I spent an entire day writing charts for all the sleeve sizes before I came up with a much more efficient way of doing it. Then I ripped out that sleeve and started over in a way that made much more sense. I did add cap sleeve shaping to the sleeves and they ended up setting into the armholes nicely, with color panels lining up and everything. The sleeves are on the long side, so they’re rolled up in the photo. If you want to make this, you can make the sleeves slightly shorter by working fewer main color rows before starting on the contrast color panel at the beginning of the piece. But I like the rolled cuffs myself.
This sweater is monstrous. It’s so warm that I don’t think my brother-in-law, the lucky recipient and model, will need a coat all winter. I really love the Eco Wool for this. It comes in the perfect colors and works up with great texture and just the right bulkiness. It’s also fairly inexpensive for the yardage.
I want to say a word about the zipper too. I really wanted to have the tacky ring-pull zipper that the original features, but none of the local fabric stores carried it, and I had a really hard time even finding anything similar online. So I went to Goodwill with a measuring tape, and to my joy and amazement, I found the perfect zipper on a women’s cardigan. Thrift stores are my preferred weird zipper shopping destination.
My overall conclusion is that making knock-offs is hard, much harder than I anticipated. But now I get to share my joy with all of you. I’d love to see other Dudes come into the world. The pattern is free so now you have no excuse. You’re welcome.
Errata: On 12/1/09 I updated the pattern to fix 2 small errors in the sleeve directions for sizes 1x and 2x. If you’re making one of those sizes, I recommend downloading the new version below. The errata is at the top of the second page on the sleeves. It originally stated, “Starting on row 9, inc at each side every 4 [4, 4, 6] rows 22[21, 22, 22, 22] times. 81 [83, 89, 91, 93] sts.” It should read, “Starting on row 9, inc at each side every 4 rows 22[21,21, 18, 18] times. 81 [83, 89, 91, 93] sts.” So increase every 4 rows for all sizes. For the largest two sizes, increase 18 times. Sorry for the confusion and huge thanks to Jane for pointing this out.
