Revisiting Devon: a grown-ass man’s sweater in a baby blanket yarn

This is the second Devon sweater I’ve made. The first was twelve years ago, and at that time it was a big step for me: it was my first cabled sweater, and the first sweater I’d made for my husband – for anyone but myself, really – and I was so proud of it. But there were some rookie mistakes I made on that one that, as much as I loved it, made me long to take another pass at this pattern. The biggest one: fiber selection.

My hubs can be very persnickety about textures, so I took him with me to a LYS to choose the yarn. He’s blond and blue-eyed, so blue is very much his color and our intention was to make a blue sweater…but the yarn he found that he really liked was a beautiful baby alpaca, of which they didn’t have a blue in stock. So we got a beautiful green, it was fine. It was heavenly to knit with, so incredibly luxurious and soft, and the day I finished it I was so thrilled. He was thrilled.

But as beloved as the finished sweater was, it was also, we discovered, very fragile: almost immediately the pilling began, and the definition on the cables started to haze over. It quickly stretched out of shape around the cuffs and bottom edge. The effort involved with caring for it, and the rapid deterioration of how it looked, meant it rarely got worn. It’s still the softest and warmest thing he owns, but it’s not really presentable: a pilly, hazy, misshapen shadow of its former self.

Having learned this lesson, I made him another sweater a couple of years later out of a less expensive cotton/acrylic blend, something he can throw in the wash with regular laundry, lazily fold (aka “wad up”) in a drawer with his other clothes and it’ll always look fine. It’s a wardrobe staple: 9 years later he still wears it almost year-round. And it’s blue. But it’s starting to look its age.

So I recently decided it was time to make him a new everyday sweater, with those same lessons learned about care and color when choosing a fiber. And as I was searching Ravelry for patterns, I looked at Devon again, and was reminded of how much I love that pattern. Nora Gaughan’s taste level is just so high: the twining vine cables are beautiful without being overly busy, the vertical columns are slimming and quietly elegant. I was sad that his Devon had so quickly become unwearable, and I really wanted him to have a Devon that was a) blue, and b) easy to care for – a Devon he would want to wear.

Which is how I ended up making this grown-ass man’s sweater out of cotton-acrylic baby-blanket yarn.
He loves the feel of it – frankly, I really enjoyed the feel of it, too – yet it requires no special care or attention. He can treat it however he likes, it’ll always spring back. Oh, and I did a tubular cast-on at the cuffs and tubular bind-off at the neck, to give it more ease going over his head and a more finished look. (My only hesitation is how aggressive that color is – I would have maybe liked some heathering or slight color variation throughout. This is a pretty vivid blue to be that strongly solid in an adult man’s sweater – but it doesn’t seem to bother him at all, so I’m content.)

We will both always love the cloudy, pilly, wonky alpaca Devon folded up in his closet; but I’m really happy to have the Wearable Devon achievement unlocked.