Happy September! I love the first of September for many reasons (the feeling that summer is drawing to an end, heading back to school, the Hogwarts Express…) so I’m extremely pleased that today is the day that the first of Quince & Co.’s fall collections is being released. This also means that I have another new pattern to show you! Meet Svana, a cropped pullover knit in Chickadee. It’s part of the Glen collection, and it features several little details that I’m super pleased with.

For this design I wanted to play around with a kind of mod silhouette, pattern blocking, and using more than two colors, so I decided to try my hand at working up the traditional Japanese seigaiha (or wave) pattern in stranded knitting. I quite like how the chart came out, but the repeats are relatively large, so to make it easier to grade the pattern for different sizes I decided to work a faux seam (basically a vertical stripe sequence) at each side of the body in order to break up the motif. While the faux seam serves a very practical purpose here, I actually really love the look of it and might use it again in the future (even when its practical use isn’t strictly necessary).

Svana also features compound raglan shaping at the shoulders and a doubled collar (knit twice as long as the final length, then folded over and sewn down to the inside of the neckline). This is a design element I also used on my first pattern for Quince, Ebba, though Svana’s collar is taller than Ebba’s and the cut of the neck is a round crew neck. I love the gentle heathery grey of the Iceland colorway in Chickadee, although my original vision for this sweater featured a much darker grey and blue – something about fall always brings out my fondness for deep, rich greys, blues, and greens (perhaps because they look so nice against the autumn foliage?). But I think the design looks equally as nice in the lighter colorways, and the blue used here is actually the same as we used for Ebba (the Delft colorway), which I have a great fondness for. While the sweater does use three colors, the vast majority of the stranded colorwork is just two colors per round; only where the pattern meets the solid top color are there a few rounds with three colors carried in a round.

Svana is available as a single pattern as well as part of the ebook for the Glen collection (and I highly recommend checking out the rest of the collection).