Gemma 
Welcome to the first WIP (work in progress) Wednesday here on the blog! You know I love my yarn-y crafts, so I wanted to try something new and share them with you in a slightly different way than I usually do. In these WIP Wednesday posts (which will hopefully be weekly occurrences, providing that I’ve got something on my needles/hook!), I’ll be sharing much more of the behind-the-scenes process behind my projects, as close to real time as I can manage, so that you can see them grow from balls of yarn into finished products. I’ve wanted to do this for a while because I think it’s important to highlight the joy of the process, as well as the end result, especially with a slower craft like knitting.
Back in May, I set up a Knitting Scrapbook as a way of creating a physical record of some of my more ambitious and creative projects. Today’s post features the first of those projects: a Porcelain Sweater, made using the yarn from the 2025 Bridgerton Advent from Castle View Yarns! I figured this would be a great project to try out this new, weekly update approach because it’s a little more complicated than most of my other makes!
In this post, I’ll take you through my planning process for this sweater and chat a little bit about the yarn I’m using, how I set up the corresponding pages in my Knitting Scrapbook and, of course, the swatching stage!
Castle View Yarns: 2025 Bridgerton Advent
This project was definitely one that started from the yarn— I bought the yarn and chose the pattern for the yarn, not the other way around!
Because this yarn was an Advent collection, it is no longer available (which is a huge shame, because it is so, so beautiful!). However, Castle View Yarns has a large range of other beautiful yarns to choose from, so I’d definitely recommend checking out the shop anyway!
The Backstory
I was so thrilled that I managed to snatch up one of the leftover Merino DK versions of the 2025 Bridgerton Advent from Castle View Yarns last year, after I missed the cut off date for preorders. I had been intending to purchase the 4ply version, but it sold out immediately! Instead, I settled for the DK version and I’m actually really pleased now, because it led to this project.
The first time I heard about the Advent was through an Instagram post that was suggested to me the day after preorders closed (literally! The day after!), which was such bad luck. I was truly heartbroken because I felt like this product was just made for me: I mean, I love Bridgerton, I love yarn and I love Advent calendars! Even more so, I loved the concept colour palette for the collection: this gorgeous, muted rainbow gradient. Unable to admit defeat, I waited (kind of patiently, kind of obsessively) until Castle View Yarns announced when the leftover stock would be on sale, set multiple alarms and started refreshing the webpage from about 5 minutes before the release time. Honestly, I have not taken anything quite this seriously since I got my tickets for the Eras Tour!
At 6pm on the dot, on a dark evening in November, I was there, ready to go and get the yarn that I had been dreaming about ever since May. Unfortunately, I got lost on the webpage (no, seriously, I couldn’t figure out which listing was which and nearly purchased one of the Weekly Advents, which I’m sure was lovely, but wasn’t quite what I wanted!). Eventually, I found the right place, put the 4ply Daily Advent in my basket, went to check out and… it had been sold! Disaster!
In a haze, I went back to the listing and found that there were still a couple of the DK versions available. In that moment, I made a split second decision to go for it, despite having no idea what I’d use it for. I had come this far, though and was not about to be defeated!
My last-minute Advent arrived on the 1st December, which was super fast and meant I could open one yarn package each day, as intended. If you’ve been here for a while, you might remember that I was absolutely plagued by colds and illnesses last December, which was not fun at all, but opening up this Advent every day bought me so much joy— it was so special! I loved seeing all the colours in person, seeing the Bridgerton inspiration in their names and shades and watching the gradient form during the course of the month.
The Yarn
The 2025 Bridgerton Advent that I purchased included 24 x 20g mini skeins of Soft Merino DK (a 100% superwash merino, 225m/100g yarn). The shades form a soft, muted rainbow gradient, beginning and ending in the golden-orange shades. All of the shades had specific inspirations from the Bridgerton Series (up to Season 3, because Season 4 had not yet been released at that point!).
The yarns came individually wrapped and numbered in a velvety grey sack (like, a fancy sack, not a sack sack). A wax-sealed (!) envelope was enclosed, which contained a list of all of the yarn names, day-by-day. Also, there was a little glass bee stitch marker wrapped into the Day 1 package, along with the yarn, which was a fun surprise! My only problem was that, inside of the packages, the yarn itself was not labelled, so I used some card and safety pins to label it myself, in case I got all of the shades mixed up (which, honestly, might still have happened at some point— I wouldn’t be able to tell!).
I paid £145 for the Advent, along with £3.95 in shipping, bringing my total to £148.95. I know that this is a lot of money, though it is actually pretty reasonable for hand-dyed yarn from a one-woman business, I think! Nevertheless, I specifically saved for this product, knowing how much joy it would bring me and considering it a super special, Christmas present to myself.
Deciding What to Make with the Yarn
I spent a long time deciding what to make with this yarn. There are lots of patterns designed for 4ply Advent yarns, but not quite so many for DK Advent yarns. I spent a lot of time scrolling through Ravelry, looking for inspiration, obsessively checking the meterage of each project and just being generally indecisive and unsure.
Time ticked by (which is why I’m only just working with my 2025 Advent yarn now, in August 2026!), until I suddenly stumbled upon the perfect project. It was a pattern that was already in my favourites, that I knew I wanted to make at some point but hadn’t yet contemplated super seriously. It was, of course, the ever-popular Porcelain Sweater by LE KNIT by Lene Holme Samsøe!
Porcelain Sweater
The Porcelain Sweater is an incredibly popular, knitted jumper pattern. It’s typically made with just two colours: a main colour, which forms the bulk of the sweater, and a contrast colour, which is used to work three horizontal bands of colourwork. My idea was to use a classic, cream shade for the main colour, but to use the Advent yarns as the contrast colour, working my way through the gradient as I worked my way down through the colourwork
bands. To help myself visualise this, I sketched (read: I traced, your girl is not an artist) out what I had in mind on my iPad and, in doing so, convinced myself to go for it!
The suggested yarn for the Porcelain Sweater is a fingering weight yarn, held together with a mohair to give a DK-ish weight. I’m not a huge fan of mohair anyway, so I was happy to replace those two yarns with a single strand of DK. The next challenge was finding a cream yarn that was similar to the Advent yarn base that I could use as the main colour, which meant that, ideally, I wanted the yarn to fit the following conditions:
- Superwash
- Merino
- 225m/100g
- Not too pricey (because I’d already spent so much on the Advent itself!)
Eventually, I settled on DROPS Merino Extra Fine. This is a superwash, merino yarn that I have used before and isn’t too expensive (£3.50 per ball). It’s ever so slightly thicker than the Advent yarn (105m/50g, compared to 225m/100g), which isn’t ideal, but it worked out fine when I swatched it. You can feel the difference in the two yarns slightly when you’re knitting, but you can’t tell just by looking at the knitted fabric.
Knitting Scrapbook
Once I’d made all of those big decisions, it was time to get out my Knitting Scrapbook and christen it with its first project! I was so excited for this part— I really wanted the pages to reflect my vision for the finished project and add an extra level of fun and creativity to the whole process!
This project will have 3 x double-page spreads: a Mood Board, a Notes/Progress Tracker and, finally, a spread dedicated to Photos of the final product!
Mood Board
I wanted my mood board to have lots of colour, to reflect all of the colours in the finished jumper! I really leaned into the scrapbooking style and layered up patterned papers, printed photos, stickers and stamped designs to encapsulate everything that had been swirling around in my mind since I dreamed this project up.
I included my mockup of the finished jumper, as well as the original pattern photo from LE KNIT and a still from the show of Violet Bridgerton drinking from a porcelain cup (because it felt very fitting).
I also included images of the yarns I would be using: photos of the Advent yarns that I had taken, as well as images of the DROPS yarn that I found online and the original graphic for the Advent too.
Notes/Progress Tracker
This spread is a little less busy, because its main purpose is to provide a space for me to jot down any important information about the project as I knit it up.
On the left-hand page, I have labelled the space ‘Notes’: this will be where I can write down any significant changes I’ve made, or any otherwise important information that I need to remember (needle size, yarn amounts etc.).
On the right-hand page, there’s a space for keeping track of my progress. This isn’t as useful as the notes section but, seeing as this scrapbook is supposed to be part-useful journal, part-memento, I think it will be a nice page to come back to in the future and see how long the project took me and what order I did everything in.
Gauge Swatching
The Porcelain Jumper is knit both flat and in the round at different points throughout the process. In both sections, some of the work is plain, using only one colour, and some of the work is worked with two strands of yarn to form the colourwork. Because of this, it was hard to know which way to work the gauge swatch: I usually swatch in the round, because the majority of a jumper is usually knitted that way, but it is one of my absolute least favourite things to do.
In the end, I began the swatching journey with a flat swatch of just the DROPS yarn on 4.0mm needles. I then worked a swatch in the round using the same yarn and needles, so that I could compare my tensions. My tension in the round was a little looser, so I tried making the flat swatch again using a 4.5mm needle. I blocked my swatches, checked my tensions and decided that the yarn would work for the pattern and the suggested 4mm needle was best, both flat and in the round (either the flat swatch loosened out a little or the round swatch tightened up— who knows, but they were pretty similar in the end!).
The next stage was to swatch the colourwork. I decided to swatch the colourwork flat, because I knew it was going to be a complicated enough process without introducing the whole working-in-the-fake-round thing. I opted to knit a single row of each of the 24 colours of yarn in the swatch so that, when I blocked it, I could see whether any of the colours would run, which was one of my biggest concerns with this project. The charts in the pattern each contain 17-19 rows of colourwork, so I had to extend one of them a little to fit all 24 colours in (which was no matter— it’s just a swatch after all!).
Amazingly, none of the colours ran, despite the fact that there are some quite deep-toned reds and purples, along with some quite strong greens. I was thrilled! I was also absolutely in love with the swatch: just like my mockup of the finished Porcelain Sweater, the colourwork swatch definitely gave me that “I’m on the right track!” feeling.
Final Thoughts
And with that, I was ready to begin! I planned this Porcelain Sweater x Bridgerton Advent pretty thoroughly, because I knew it was a little out of the ordinary for me. At the end of the day though, I did just want to get going so, once the DROPS yarn arrived, I got started! I haven’t made a whole lot of sweaters, so I was slightly daunted, but I was also so excited to see how the project worked up.
As I mentioned, I’m going to be trying something a little new with this project by posting weekly updates. I’ll be showing you how far I’ve got, chatting about any changes/choices I’ve made and sharing my mid-knit thoughts with you as we go. I hope I’ll see you back here next week, for another WIP Wednesday!
If you're interested...
You can purchase the Porcelain Sweater pattern by LE KNIT by Lene Holme Samsøe on Ravelry here.
You can find the Ravelry project page for my Porcelain Sweater here.
Gemma
xxx
