My Aquamarline aka Coronavirus Shelter-in-place Sweater

Hello! I hope most of you are doing well through this global pandemic. In my little corner of the world, we have a shelter-in-place where school, work and almost everything else has moved into our homes. I feel fortunately that for us, life has not completely stopped, but just slowed down a little. I get a little (okay a lot) more time with the girls, a little bit less time to myself (because homeschool + still a full load of work), lots of cooking (trying to avoid eating take outs) and walking around the neighborhood.

About 2 weeks ago I saw the Aquamarline sweater made by Alison and I fell in love, hard. I really wanted to knit one. Problem was, I had not knitted after the last project, and have already given all my knitting needles away, who went out of the country. But I had some really awesome scrape yarn (many cashmere blends) from a friend that i thought would be perfect for this project, and i wanted to get supplies before everything shuts down (which seemed like the direction we were going towards). So i ran to Joanns, grabbed all the needles I needed, and the day after, bam – shelter in place. I was equally happy with myself for getting all the knitting supples on time as I was with stocking the house with food before the shelter in place. (Side note, Joanns apparently is still open and considered essential service, which, had me raising my eye brows a little but hey, I have enough fabric stash to last me through 5 years of quarantine and if i didnt, i may have considered Joanns essential as well (70% /s). At least they did supply free mask making kits to the public!)

Anyways, i didnt work on any projects besides making masks and this sweater the past 2 weeks. This is such a easy knit, and such a fun knit too. I never thought about combining yarns together to create a marbled look before- but now i might be hooked!!!

I made 2 modification to the pattern – I made the cuff much smaller, as it was still very loose. I also started knitting the neck band ribbing in the round right at when the instruction said to separate necks. I wanted a slight off the shoulder look. I had to re-do the neck band 2 times – it was always looser than i expected. I had to switch down to a size 7 with very tight gauge to get it just right. In the end, the sweater overall came out a little bigger than i expected, but i love the oversized look!!

Here’s all the views of the sweater!

(The yellow and medium grey was scrape from two other sweaters; a dark and light thin grey from thrift shop; black and beige+black + thin fuzz white which made part grey area around my chest and upper arm fuzzy looking from my friend Nat, and the thicker grey yarn for the top part of the sweater in my stash).

The completion of this sweater got me out of my sweatshirt + sweatpants for the past two weeks. And i can tell you, lets hope i can still pull off this outfit after the coronavirus quarantine! Getting those pants on was a struggle! I am grateful that this is my biggest problem in this pandemic so far though.

Also, I might have bought a load of elastics to sew masks because the one spool with 288 yards was the only one that was going to arrive in a week. If you are sewing masks and need some elastics, i can mail you some (US only!). Leave me a comment and I’ll email you to get your address! Hope you are all surviving the pandemic okay out there!!!!

Lastly, above is “instagram” and below is “reality” 🙂 Not too bad, eh?