YOLK!

One punning moment last December, I decided it might be fun to knit the familiar homonyms – yoke and yolk – into an egg-themed sweater. So please behold – my YOLK YOKE.

Yes, I am standing in a frozen landscape dressed as a fried egg – what of it?

There are so many egg-cellent things to enjoy about this sweater: it is a simple, quick, and super -straightforward knit. It has a bold, graphic appearance that is very wearable. And, perhaps most of all, it is lots of FUN.

There is nothing complicated at all about this YOLK. The sweater is worked in the round, from the bottom up, in plain stockinette, apart from three small areas of stranded colourwork around the sleeve tops and body. This is the only potentially tricky part: you do have to take quite a bit of care when knitting the egg-white colourwork because the floats are really rather long. I decided not to ‘catch’ these long floats at all (because of the risk of the high-contrast shades showing through to the front of the work).

To ensure my tension remained even through these areas, I went up a needle size for the sleeve tops, and took a lot of time and care with the long floats, fanning the stitches out on my needles, and twisting the two yarns around each other at every colour change. Then, when I wet blocked the sweater, I turned it inside out, and, with some gentle abrasion, slightly felted the long floats so they stuck together a wee bit, before turning the sweater the right way round and allowing it to dry.

The stranded colourwork is all completed before the yoke / yolk is joined together – and the rest of the sweater is plain sailing in two shades. I actually knitted the top of the sweater twice: once using rounds of circular decreases throughout, and once using the combination of raglan decreases (for the white section) and circular decreases (for the yellow yolk) that you see here.

For me, the appearance of the circular decreases on the white section of the first version interrupted the sweater’s graphic feel and I much preferred my second version, with its combination shaping.

Though the whole point of the sweater is to resemble a fried breakfast, I also wonder how a two-tone version might look, with the yoke worked in one bold shade, like a gigantic paint splodge. . .

. . . yet personally I have no objections to looking like a big fried egg, and this sweater, with its unusually rich potential for terrible puns, has certainly brought some laughs over the past few weeks.

. . . and I don’t need much egging on to wear it!

The YOLK pattern is available to download from Ravelry or the KDD shop where you’ll also find kits in all sizes.