May Studio: Jiutepec from Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton's "Noro Eternal"

As soon as “Noro Eternal” came out, I fell in love with Jiutepec for its design and yarns: Noro Iro and Silk Garden. In case you did not know, I just adore Noro yarns. Of course, it helps that the model is showing off the garment so stylishly. In any case, Jiutepec's knitting process caught my eyes. Ms. Hamilton's previous books also included a design with holes and I wanted to try them on a garment. Also interesting is that the garment is knitted with size 7 mm needles throughout even though Iro is very bulky and Silk Garden is worsted weight. I had yarns in my stash for more than two years before I started the project this year. Thinking back, I did not jump into this project immediately because I was unsure about the success of the garment. For one thing, I was not quite sure which cast on method I should employ for holes. Once decided that simple loop cast on will do, I felt more comfortable and started the project. I wanted my cast on edges to be soft and not bulky.

This garment is knit side-way: Starting at right front band, and proceed to right front body, back body, left front body, and left front band. I was happily knitting along until I hit left front neck shaping. It did not look the same as the right neck shaping. I think the right front neck shaping is not correct and that's what you knit at the beginning. There is no way I would undo all the way to the beginning. I wish I had checked the pattern before I casted on. When the right neck shaping is followed, I would have a very odd neck opening with back neck width of hardly 2". My neck is not that skinny. If you follow the left neck shaping, it would be about 4" which is more reasonable. Since I did not want to undo all the knitting, I compromised to use the right neck shaping. In order to produce enough back neck width, front shoulders were eased somewhat when sewn onto the back shoulders. This fudging seems to have worked.

There is one more issue to this pattern on the ribbed edges. When they tell you to repeat two rows 6 more times, one of the two repeated rows involve increasing two stitches every 5 stitches. If followed as instructed, the ribbed edging will become quite voluminous which is not what you see on the garment photos. Obviously, the referred row is not the one to repeat. I proceeded to do k4-p3 ribbing for 12 more rows.

The amount of yarns used for the smallest size were the following: 2.5 skeins of Noro Iro in Reds,2 skeins of Noro Iro in Grey/Browns, 3 skeins of Noro Silk Garden in Grey/Browns.