Max is a lucky dog. I felt like a psychic as I found myself finishing up his sweater just as the blizzard started to hit. In addition to making him a little happier about going out in the snow (which he basically hates to do now that he’s a grumpy old man), it meant that I could get totally adorable pictures for this post. Are you ready for some dog butt?
I’ve written up the pattern for this and am very happy with how it came out — it’s by far my most polished and professional-looking pattern, as well as the most complicated item I’ve ever attempted to write a pattern for. It has colorwork charts and everything, guys! Go here to download it. I encourage you to do this even if you’re one of my friends who reads this blog but doesn’t knit, just so you can be impressed with my skills.
One thing I learned during the past few days is that knitwear designing is way hard. Without a pattern in front of me, I transform into a knitting moron who forgets basic concepts like “do the ribbing with the smaller needles” and “once you have finished the ribbing, switch to the larger needles.” I eventually just had to write down the pattern for myself ahead of time, including all the subsidiary instructions like that, just to prevent myself from relapsing into moronhood.
I made the charts with the Knitting Chart Maker by Jacqui, a free program that I found by googling around and ended up liking well enough. You use it right in your browser so there’s nothing to download, and the interface is pretty intuitive. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to save my charts as jpeg files, so I ended up just taking screen shots of them.
Here’s a shot of the underside of the sweater, so you can understand the construction a little better. Basically it’s knit as a rectangle on the top, and a slightly longer trapezoid on the bottom, so that the armholes can have a little ease. All this is explained in much more detail in the pattern itself:
In fact, most of the rest of what you’ll probably want to know is in the pattern, so go forth and download it! There’s still time to make your dog a sweater for Christmas!
Here’s Max inside with the Christmas tree. Look how dapper he is with his bow tie! Clothes on dogs are the best.