Bird of Another Colour

When you continue to share online, people find out.  Friends tell their friends; family members tell other family members and I talk about it at work.  My colleagues although patient probably get more information than they want and certainly more than they need about this blog.   Lucky for me a few colleagues also knit and we swap stories.

One of these colleagues is simply a fantastic knitter.  She is a specialist in socks and lace, but she has ample skills in all areas related to knitting.  Her work is professional, neat and consistent.  When she dropped by the other day to show me this toddler sweater she designed, I told her I had to share.

She told me the blue and gray Xs and Os design was taken from a Scandinavia reindeer sweater and the owls were simply (??) designed on graph paper.  Once she had the size of the Xs and Os plus the owls organized the entire sweater was proportioned around their dimensions.  According to the designer the collar was pretty much done freehand.  It certainly tops off this sweater properly.  

Here's the back with the owls on it as well.

As if this isn't wonderful enough it was the inside that blew me away.  My colleague told me she's able to knit with both hands and used a stranding technique that yields this:

Look how clean this technique works up with the stranding all neatly tucked away instead of having the more tradition stranding loops that look like this:

My stranding skill can improve so I decided to check out the techniques used by my colleague.  And after some research I found Knitty offered the most complete and easy to follow instructions on how to do both techniques.  Check out the link for all the details.

Thanks colleague for sharing the bird of another colour sweater.  It is too beautiful not to share and should you write up the pattern let me know; I'd buy it.