The Gigante Jumper: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
By Fernando Santos
I've given a Gigante to all of my close friends. Everybody has one but me. I'd just made myself a laptop tote, it was getting colder, and I decided that instead of a cardigan I wanted a jumper. What came out the other end is the one strangers now stop me about in the street. What they don't see is four restarts, a sleeve that didn't work, two necks I pulled out, a colour my partner talked me out of, and the stitches I swore I'd never do. This is the whole story, with the photos I took along the way.
The good
I didn't start with a drawing. I happen to adore our merino blends, so it was always going to come from that family. Pastel Rainbow has mint, butter, peach, sky and lemon in one strand. The plan, such as it was, went no further than this: a band across the chest, the cuffs and the neck in one solid colour, and that colour pulled from inside the blend. I tried several.
I'm a graphic designer. Colour is the part of the job I'm best at, and I have always thought lavender was my colour. My partner thought it was too feminine. So I settled, reluctantly, on dark forest green, and kept going.
The bad
I knitted the front and the back in the regular Gigante wool, the roving every cardigan is made of, with the band in forest green. No neck yet, no sleeves. And it was wrong. Not the knitting: the wool. A jumper needs drape and movement, and this one stood up on its own. Armour. The thickness that makes a cardigan is simply too much for a garment that has to hang off the body and move with it.
I frogged it. I knitted it again. I frogged that too. Four times, and somewhere in there I was splitting hairs, and wool, and it clicked. In design we have one rule above all the others: form follows function. The form wasn't suitable for the function of a jumper, so the form had to change. The roving that arrives from the mill is about an inch thick and unworkable until it's tamed, and taming it is the first job on every bundle we sell (there's a whole post on that). So why not split it once more? Still gorgeous, still Gigante, with smaller stitches that could fit a jumper. I tried it, and Gigante Junior was born.
Gigante Junior on the needles, wound into a ball, and knitted into the body. Splitting is fiddly. The mill's twist makes the two halves wrap round each other, and split roving breaks if you rush it, so every ball is split by hand and wound slowly. It's a faff. The jumper is worth it. And by the time the body was knitted again, the green had gone too and the lavender was back out of the drawer. The moment I saw the band on the body I knew the first instinct had been right.
The split wool gave me something I hadn't expected: freedom. I knit the cardigans with my fingers. Gigante Junior put me back on needles, and I made friends again with techniques I hadn't touched in a long while. Increases from the knit and from the purl. One-by-one rib for the hems. And things that don't really belong to chunky knitting at all, like mattress stitch for the side seams, which the big wool simply won't do.
Once the body was right, the sleeves went wrong. I picked up stitches round the armhole and knitted down in the round, and the first version was too narrow. Chunky and narrow don't go together. The second wasn't either. The third time I gave the sleeve the width it needed, let it puff, and gathered it into a long plain cuff in Lavender. That's the sleeve in the pattern.
The ugly
The neck. I did it in Lavender first, a ribbed band with the Eggshell stitches round it. It looked thick and it looked wrong. I pulled it out and tried again, Lavender rib on the finished body. Still wrong. A whole Lavender neck pulls your eye up and away from the band, which is the point of the jumper.
Neck one, neck two, and the one that stayed. The answer was to rib the neck in the blend and change to Lavender only for the cast-off, so you get one thin line of colour where it meets your skin and nothing more.
Then there was the moment the jumper was finished and I didn't like it. Body done, sleeves on, neck right, and it looked flat. Unfinished. I put it on the table and stared at it for a while.
I had never planned the running stitches. In fact I had decided against them. The question I get asked more than any other, on every post and in every message, is why I don't show the stitches the way every big chunky jumper does, and I knew why I didn't: one designer has made that stitch her signature, and I did not want to copy anyone's work. Then I thought about trainers. Adidas, Nike, every sports brand on earth uses the same language, the stripes, the swoosh, the sole, and nobody calls it copying. You can be inspired by a language without copying someone's work. So I picked up a big blunt needle and a length of Eggshell.
It needed the cream. The jumper only became the jumper on the last afternoon.
Along the top and bottom of the band. A ring round each cuff. A spiral round the hem that follows the purl rows. It took an afternoon, and it changed everything.
The stitches framing the band and ringing the cuffs, the stitches up close, and the spiral round the hem from the back.
The jumper
It took 25 to 30 hours on the needles, and that was while I was working it out. It weighs about two and a half kilos. The band is on the front only, so the back stays all blend. And people stop me about it. Not friends being kind: strangers, in the street, asking where it's from.
So I wrote it up. Three sizes, S to L, every stitch charted, and the wool already split and wound, because I'm not going to ask you to do the fiddly part. The pattern comes inside the kit, with Gigante Junior, and if you'd rather skip the needles I'll knit yours here in Worthing. Lavender was my colour all along.
One caveat, and I mean it. A Gigante jumper is considerably fiddlier and harder than a Gigante cardigan. I'm not saying the cardigans are easy, but the stitches here are smaller for a start, you're on needles rather than your fingers, and there's a lot more technique in it: picked-up sleeves, increases, rib, mattress stitch, the running stitches. If you've knitted a cardigan with us, the body will feel familiar and the rest is in the pattern, step by step. If you haven't, start with a cardigan.
And I'm not done with Gigante Junior. I'm so happy with it that I'm working on a line of beanie hats in it. The pattern exists, and I'm testing it in blends and in solid colours. Watch this space.
Keep reading
Splitting Unspun Wool for Chunky Knitting: The Good, the Bad and the Fluff
The half-hour of hand-prep behind every ball of our wool. Gigante Junior starts here.
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