Blog post! https://blog.knitpicks.com/travel-knitting-my-uk-ireland-trip-sweater/

(3/6/2019: Oops it’s now five years later and I just came to this project page to see my yarns because I’m writing a much-delayed blog post about the sweater and saw that I promised I’d add yarns and more notes when I posted the photos… and I never did. Sigh. So the exact yarns I used will never all be known. Maybe I’ll add the ones I still have the labels for… in theory, I should still have all the labels, somewhere, because I wouldn’t have thrown them away on purpose, but yeah, it’s been five years. So oh well.)

1/2/2014: I actually finished it a couple weeks ago and haven’t photographed it yet! Oops! I finished knitting it completely and weaving in the ends on December 18th, then soaked it and let it dry for a couple days before sewing the buttons on to make it be 100% finished on December 22nd. Then, that evening, I flew to California with it to show it to my family, where it was too hot to actually wear it, so it never got photographed… and then Pete and I got sick when we got back to Portland, so I still haven’t done it! Soon!

(Once I get better photos up, I’ll also adds yarns and more info!)

12/18/2013: Just finished weaving in / snipping off the ends (154 ends to be exact! Good thing I wove in most of them while knitting!) All it needs now is a vinegar soak (and some added luck that those orange and red yarns don’t bleed!), a wash, block, and the buttons sewn on. So exciting!!

11/28/2013: Over a year later, and I’ve just finished the body! Love it, but it is a seriously big project! Hoping to get the sleeves done by around the end of December / beginning of January…

9/29/2012: Our trip is over, and sweater progress is going well so far! I bought yarn in most of the cities we spent time in (with the exceptions of Belfast, where we only were for half a day, and Glasgow, where I got sick and couldn’t make it to a yarn shop, and a couple cities/towns where we only spent partial days, like Bath and Oxford), as well as buttons in most places.

During the trip, on trains and busses and cars, etc, I worked down through the Dublin stripes, changing from the white background yarn to the light grey during the Wales stripes. Up to this point, there are: 3 colors of wool from two different shops in London, some blue from Bristol, 2 tweed-ish shades from Wales, and 5 different shades of Donegal tweed from Dublin (yeah I went a bit crazy for the Donegal!).

Next will be some red tweed from Galway (mixed with a bit more of the Donegal tweed from Dublin), then a few different shetlands and other local wools from Edinburgh, Harris tweed from York, and some nicely colored wools from our last couple days back in London.

notes on this flickr photo show which stripes are from which places, up to this point.

pre-start: I’m planning on making my first sweater while traveling throughout the UK and Ireland! My plan is to take these three skeins of natural colors with me, and then to buy a different skein in each major city we go to, all in different colors, and to stripe them all in, in the order of our travels (which will most likely be: London, Bristol, Criccieth, Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, York… minus any where we don’t find yarn shops, plus any others in between where we do find yarn shops…)

Hoping the striping idea works out with this pattern - in my head, it looks amazing!!