Pattern Review: Ranunculus Sweater

This is a pretty bold statement, but this may have been my favourite knit of 2019. I actually feel like I have the equivalent of a book hangover, a knit hangover.

I had seen a few Ranunculus sweaters on Instagram and thought they were really pretty, and then when Lindsay of Hello Stella announced a KAL I really started to pay attention. And I became obsessed. Ranunculus is such a gorgeous sweater! The lace work, the texture, the open knit…all stunning! And it was so fun seeing the colour choices of everyone else doing the KAL!

There are so many options for knitting this sweater. You can use almost any weight of yarn and just get a different effect. Which means that technically you could do some stash diving and not have to spend a cent! I considered this option, because I thought I could possibly even use some Hello Stella yarn I have in my stash. But I loved Lindsay’s Ranunculus so much, with fingering weight held together with baby suri alpaca that I had to do that version too. So I got what I could in Lindsay’s shop update – 2 skeins of purl grey on Sporty Stella, and 2 skeins of hubba on Cozy Stella (baby suri alpaca). The suri alpaca is amazingly soft. While I have nothing against mohair, I’m not sure I could ever use it again, I love suri too much!!!

There are also 2 different neck lines and 3 different sleeves. I wanted to be sure the neckline wasn’t going to be so wide that it would fall off my shoulders. I’ve also been feeling like I don’t have enough mid-weight knits so it needed to be short sleeved. The smaller neckline starts with a tubular cast on. Which is a provisional cast on + some sort of sorcery that wraps around your provisional cast on. I have no idea how it works, but it’s super cool.

When I started my Ranunculus I intended for it to be my outfit for Our Maker Life which meant knitting it in 5 days…or less if I wanted to block it. But OML is a very full event, and I spent a ton of time in a car one of those days, and finished a book, so that didn’t happen. It worked out for the best since it meant I wore my own original design to OML, and had the mindless parts of my Ranunculus to keep my hands busy during the event.

I lengthened the body quite a bit to accommodate my long torso and the cropped sweater trend is not my favourite. I used almost every inch of my Sporty Stella so it is pretty much at its maximum length for the yarn I chose. I was hoping that blocking would add a little more length as well, and maybe open up the neck a bit. It wasn’t as open as I was expecting from the pictures in the pattern. And as you can see the arms really needed to be flattened out (though I loved that I didn’t need to knit any arms, yay no sleeve island!)

I would seriously consider making another one, perhaps long sleeved, and making the same thing more than once is usually not my idea of a great time. But it’s just so pretty!