Like many of my fellow queers and smutty romance lovers, I found myself completely sucked into the world of Heated Rivalry this past December. After the hectic holiday market season ended, I took a few days off at Christmas and binged the entire six-episode Crave series (I caught up just in time to head to The Cottage when the last episode was released at midnight Christmas night). And like many knitters, I immediately decided I needed to knit a loon sweater, so I ordered some Harrisville Designs Shetland yarn on cones, so I could whip up something quickly on my knitting machine. And of course, I binged all six books in the Game Changers series by Rachel Reid that inspired the series while waiting for my yarn to arrive. As soon as my order was delivered, I put on the Heated Rivalry soundtrack on Qobuz (because we don’t use Spotify in this house), and got to work knitting swatches and designing a simple drop shoulder pullover. I knitted all the pieces on my vintage Brother KX-350 mid-gauge knitting machine, seamed them all together by hand, and I’m hand-knitting all the ribbing for the collar, hem, and cuffs. (There is a way to knit a kind of faux-rib on the KX-350, but I don’t like the way it looks, so I prefer to hand-knit.) Hand-knitting the rib takes a lot more time than machine knitting it, but I promise the time flies if you knit while watching a gay hockey romance series.
Download the free chart here.
For the loon chart, I was inspired by those duck sweaters from the 80s, like in The Great Knitting Book from the American School of Needlework (I bought this book at a vintage market in Somerville purely for this duck sweater). I’ve been thinking for years that it would be fun to knit a sweater like this, but I never had a real reason to motivate me to cast on. But as soon as I watched the Cottage episode with my roommate, I knew I needed one of these sweaters, but with loons instead of ducks. Or as Ilya calls them, “stupid Canadian wolf birds”. I found a couple of photos of loons and wrote up a chart based on those. I decided I couldn’t just have one sad, lonely loon, so I flipped the chart and gave my little gay Canadian loon a cute bi boyfriend loon. And then I found some gold chain links and a charm and gave that bi king a little cross necklace (it was his mother’s). So now my two queer loon lovers (no, that’s gross) can live happily ever after on a lake in Ontario (or Québec, depending on the source material) and I have a cozy wool sweater to wear next time I find myself at a lakeside cottage (anyone have a lakeside cottage they want to invite me to? I can cook and even cut recipes in half.)
So if you want to knit your own sweater with cute loon boyfriends, here is the chart! I don’t have a pattern for the sweater itself since I don’t write machine knitting patterns, but you can apply this chart to any sweater you like, or even make it as a pillow, wall hanging, blanket, whatever you want! The chart is 89 stitches by 39 rows, so keep that in mind for any patterns you choose to apply it to. For sweaters, it works best for a fingering weight gauge. You can knit the chart directly into the fabric using intarsia or you can duplicate stitch the loons onto a finished piece, which is what I did. I have a duplicate stitch tutorial available here if you want to try this technique. The yarn I used is Harrisville Designs Shetland in Grass for the main sweater (just about 2 cones) and then small amounts of Shetland in Ebony, White, and Cypress for the chart. The dark grey for the beaks is Garthenor Snowdonia I had leftover from a pair of socks, and the eyes are Knit Picks Palette in Pimento.
Happy knitting, and see you at the Cottage!