The Rose Jumper: A Stitch in Time Retrospective

The fabulous cover-star of the book, The Rose Jumper is one of the most flattering patterns that you can knit from A Stitch in Time. With a beautiful textured pattern, this jumper is a real looker, and far more easy to knit than you might think. It has been graded for the modern woman and now comes in four sizes, to fit bust 30-44 inches. The texture is formed from an easy to remember 8 row stitch pattern and knits up really quickly.

 The Rose Jumper © Arbour House Publishing

The garment is a lovely feminine sweater which was first published in Women's Weekly magazine in 1934. The look of the time was a ladylike, soft line which didn't fit too closely to the body. The jumper is knitted in four parts: the front, back and two arms are knitted up separately and seamed up after finishing. The roses of it's name create a pretty detail at the neckline and are made in crochet.

The Rose Jumper © Arbour House Publishing

The Rose Jumper is knitted in a fine DK yarn, and author Susan Crawford advises that it needs to be nice and soft to drape nicely. The original is knitted up in some alpaca silk from Blue Sky Alpaca. You can see which yarns other people knitted the jumper in on the project page on Ravelry (by clicking here) to see both how different yarns worked for the pattern, and also whether you have something in your stash that might work.

 Rose Jumper Tension Square © Ingrid Murnane

As always, please do knit yourself a tension square (gauge swatch). A quick hint for knitting a square in the pattern - add an extra stitch to the four in the stitch pattern (eg 21 instead of 20 or 29 instead of 28) so that you can see how it will knit up over the pattern as it is written. I knitted up one earlier in some RYC Cashcotton DK which I had handy. This yarn is a little bigger than the original, and has thus knitted up a little more densely than the original yarn, but still retains enough drape, so I think I'll stick with it. I'll have to do another square though, as it has turned out a little too big. You'll only be able to tell that sort of thing by doing a tension square in your preferred yarn though. There's more information about knitting tension squares here.

If you are thinking of knitting The Rose Jumper for yourself or somebody else, here is a bit more information from the pattern's Ravelry page, and also the link to the page for A Stitch in Time volume 1 on the knitonthenet shop.

As always, if you do knit one, send us a photograph! We'd love to see your hard work.

Happy knitting
Ingrid x