Knitting a Soldotna Crop

For my birthday I received a skein of DK in the colour Love Struck from Spectrum Fibre and I wanted to use it as one of the colours in a Soldotna Crop. Shortly after my birthday I purchased some more yarn from Spectrum Fibre to accompany Love Struck. I used Love Struck as C1, Little Blue Dress as C2, Blush as C3 and Cosmos as C4. I purchased two skeins of Little Blue Dress as I wanted to knit mine to be a bit longer than the sample, but only needed one skein of each of the other 3 colours to knit size 2. I knitted a gauge swatch for this project and needed to size up my needles to 4mm for the main needles and 3.5mm for the ribbing.

The Soldotna Crop is a top-down circular yoke sweater which uses stranded colour-work throughout. It's the most colour-work I've ever done in a project and I did find it very enjoyable, the yoke chart was easy to follow and the body chart was very simple, so I could work on it without needing to check the pattern until I reached the length I was happy with. I can see why this pattern is so popular because it's fun to knit plus the finished sweater looks great. After working on a number of projects using fingering weight yarn, it was also nice to work on a DK project for a change as it was much quicker to complete. I managed to get it done in less than two weeks.

The pattern is very easy to follow, the only area I had issues with was the wrap and turn short rows. I'd never done these before and realised when I was picking up and knitting the wraps that where the pattern had said 'K to X sts before last wrapped stitch', I had been misunderstanding which stitch was the 'wrapped stitch' so had done the wrap and turn one stitch later than I should've done. I didn't think this would affect the finished look of the garment much, so didn't try to rectify the issue.

In terms of modifications the only thing I changed was the length of the body, I did 9 repeats rather than 5, as I wanted it to be less cropped. I had seen a lot of people mention that the neckline doesn't end up looking like the sample and that's definitely true. The sample has a much wider neckline and a lot of knitters have made modifications to more closely match the sample but I decided to just follow the pattern as I wasn't too bothered about it and knew it would change slightly when I blocked it.

Overall I'm very happy with the finished sweater, it fits very well and I really love how the colours all look together. I was a little nervous whilst knitting it that Cosmos might blend in too much with some of the other colours, but that only happened in some very small patches so created a harmonious effect which I like. If you've been thinking of knitting a Soldotna Crop I would absolutely recommend it. If I ever come up with another good colour combination idea I can definitely see myself knitting another one and think I'll be getting a lot of wear out of mine.