The Rambler Yarn by Woolly Thistle
Dragonfly Sweater by Elenor Mortenson
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Yarn: The Rambler by Woolly Thistle
Pattern: Dragonfly Sweater by Elenor Mortenson
There’s a particular kind of humility that knitting can teach you - the kind that arrives usually somewhere around row 40, when you hold your work up to the light and realize something has gone wrong in a way you can’t quite name yet.
That was me, a week or so into my new project: the Dragonfly Sweater by Elenor Mortensen. A colorwork sweater, top-down, knit in the round in one piece. Raglan increases from a provisional cast on, stranded technique throughout, short rows for shaping. It is, on paper, a project that asks a lot of you.
And somewhere in my yoke, I had twisted my stitches without noticing!
So I ripped it back to the beginning, made myself a cup of tea, and started again.
Why This Pattern
I’m drawn to patterns that feel like they hold something - a mood, a world, a little mystery. The Dragonfly Sweater does that. There are options for floral or beetle motifs worked into the colorwork, and you can customize the design in ways that make the finished sweater genuinely yours. That kind of built-in flexibility is rare, and it makes the knitting feel more like a collaboration than a set of instructions to follow.
The pattern itself has been wonderfully clear. Even working through the provisional cast on and into the raglan shaping - techniques that can sometimes feel like reading a map in a foreign language - I’ve found Mortensen’s directions easy to trust. The rip-back wasn’t the pattern’s fault. It was mine, and the pattern made it easy to find my way back.
The Yarn: The Rambler for The Woolly Thistle
Now. Can we talk about this yarn for a moment?
The original pattern calls for a fingering weight superwash sock yarn, which would be beautiful. But I chose something different: The Rambler, a woolly sock yarn made exclusively for The Woolly Thistle - and only available there.
And you can feel it!
The Rambler has that quality that superwash yarns, for all their practicality, can never quite replicate: it has memory. It breathes. It grips itself in the way that makes stranded colorwork a genuine pleasure rather than a wrestling match — the floats lie flat, the tension stays even, and the fabric you’re creating has a warmth and loft to it that you can sense even before you’ve finished the yoke.
I’m working in a deep, mossy dark green and a soft stone neutral for the contrast, and even in these early rows, the combination is exactly what I hoped it would be.
If you’re considering a colorwork project and you haven’t worked with a woolly (non-superwash) sock yarn before, The Rambler is a beautiful place to start.
Where I Am Now
I’m only to the yoke. There’s a whole sweater still ahead of me: the body, the sleeves, the moment when it starts to look like a *thing* and not just a growing tube of color. I’m in no rush.
That’s what I love most about a project like this one. It asks you to stay present, to count carefully, to notice when something has gone subtly wrong — and to begin again without catastrophizing about it.
The rip-back taught me something. It always does!
I’ll be sharing more updates as this sweater grows. If you’re also casting on for the Dragonfly Sweater, I’d love to know — especially which motif you chose!