10 000 owls!

Some patterns become big favourites on Ravelry and on the knitting blogs: There are now more than 500 finished Owls sweaters out there - more than ten thousand owls!

21 of them are mine, and I love them.

The pattern is by Kate Davies, and it's free. You can read about it here.

It's my first project with Cascade 220, and definitely not the last. It's a lovely yarn. I used needles 6,5 mm, got gauge 14/10 cm, resulting in a soft, stretchy, and not too thick fabric. I didn't use more than 3 1/2 skeins.

The pattern called for a looser gauge, but I followed instructions for the largest size and ended up with a perfect size 38. I made only the lateral half of the back decreases and increases, afraid the sweater would be too tight. The result is ok, but if I knit it again, I think I would follow the pattern. It's my first sweater with short row shaping, finally understood this 'wrap and turn'-thing.

Only the central six owls in the front have buttons, for three reasons: I think it looks nice that way, I didn't find 42 similar buttons that I liked or that had a reasonable price, and I don't especially like sewing on buttons.