Pattern Spotlight: The Donnatella Sweater
The Donnatella Sweater has been years in the making, and I am so glad it is finally here. This is a Tunisian crochet top down raglan with a snowflake colorwork motif across the front, the back, and both sleeves, and it might be the pattern I am proudest of designing for myself.
Where It Started
I am a huge West Wing fan. I have seen the show hundreds of times, and it is one of my go-to background shows while I work, something familiar enough that I can half watch it and still get things done. I first saw Donna Moss wear a snowflake sweater during the season four Christmas episode, and that image stuck with me for years, long before I had the skills or the confidence to design something like it. Every winter I would think about it again and talk myself out of starting. I kept coming back to the idea anyway, and once I finally sat down to work it out, I could not stop. The Donnatella Sweater is the result, and I designed it entirely for myself with no plan to ever write the pattern up, let alone share it.
About the Design
The Donnatella Sweater is worked top down and in the round, with raglan shaping that keeps the construction clean and intuitive from the neckline all the way down. There is no seaming when you finish, just a completed sweater that grows directly off your hook, round by round. The raglan increases happen at four evenly spaced points, which keeps the fit balanced across the shoulders and lets the sweater skim the body instead of boxing it in. The snowflake motif appears across the front, the back, and both sleeves, built with stranded colorwork that reads clearly from a distance without overwhelming the fabric up close.
Choosing Your Colors
My sample is worked in cream and red, which gives it that classic holiday look, but the Donnatella Sweater was never meant to be a one season sweater. The snowflake motif depends on contrast more than it depends on any particular palette, so the real rule for choosing colors here is to pick a light and a dark that read clearly against each other. Navy and oatmeal, forest green and cream, even a deep plum against a soft gray will all let the snowflake show up the way it is meant to. Save the red and cream combination for when you actually want the holiday version, and branch out for something you will reach for all winter instead.
One practical note if you are testing colors before committing to a full sweater’s worth of yarn: when you block your gauge swatch, especially if you are pairing a light color with a dark or saturated one, check carefully for color bleeding. Some dyes, hand-dyed yarn especially, release more color in the wash than you would expect, and a dark shade bleeding into a light one can ruin a swatch or a finished sweater. I always toss a Tide color catcher sheet into the soak when I am blocking anything with mixed light and dark colors. It catches any dye that releases before it has a chance to land on the wrong section of your sweater, and it takes the guesswork out of whether a colorway is safe to pair together. If a sheet comes out of the soak with color on it, you will know to watch that yarn carefully, or avoid combining it with your lightest shade altogether.
Let’s Talk Colorwork
I want to be upfront about something: this is not a beginner pattern, and it is not really an intermediate one either. The Donnatella Sweater is built for makers who are already comfortable working Tunisian crochet in the round and have some stranded colorwork experience under their belt, because this pattern asks a lot of you from the very first colorwork round. If the only colorwork you have done is a small motif, like a single snowflake on a hat or a swatch, this is a significant step up from that. The colorwork sections here are long, and they do not let up for a while once they start.
That said, I did not design this pattern to scare anyone off. I designed it for makers who are ready to push their skills further and want a real challenge to work toward. If you already know how to Tunisian crochet in the round and you have done some colorwork, even on a smaller scale, you have what you need to succeed here. What you are signing up for is patience and focus, not a skill you do not already have.
The colorwork sections run long, which means you are either carrying extended floats across the back of the work or breaking yarn and weaving in ends as you go, whichever method you prefer. Floats work well if you keep your tension relaxed and your fabric a little stretched out as you carry the strand, so the float itself does not pucker or pull once the fabric relaxes back to its resting width. Breaking yarn avoids long floats altogether, but it does mean a lot of ends to weave in by the time you finish a sleeve. Neither method is wrong, and plenty of makers end up using both depending on how long a particular float would need to be. There is no way around the ends on this one, and that is worth knowing going in. It is a project, and finishing it is something to be genuinely proud of.
Sizing
The Donnatella Sweater comes in 18 sizes, with a finished bust from 32 inches to 66 inches. I could not settle on a single recommended ease for this one, so instead of grading sizes around one fit, I built sizes every two inches of finished bust. That means you are choosing your fit as much as your size. Pick a finished bust close to your actual measurement for something fitted and close to the body, or size up for a looser, more relaxed sweater you can layer over something else. Either way works with the pattern exactly as written, you are just deciding how much room you want to live in.
What I’m Proudest Of
Designing the Donnatella Sweater pushed every colorwork and raglan skill I have. It is one thing to make a snowflake motif work on a single sample size. It is a very different thing to keep that same motif proportional and centered across 18 sizes, from a 32 inch bust all the way to 66 inches, without the snowflake stretching, shrinking, or shifting off place as the raglan shaping changes the stitch count at every size. Getting the colorwork to scale cleanly alongside the raglan increases took every bit of math and pattern writing experience I have built up over the years. This sweater is the one I am proudest of designing, not just because I finally made it for myself, but because of what it took to make it work for everyone else too.
Make Your Own Donnatella Sweater
If you make one, I would love to see it. Tag me @violet.loops and use #DonnatellaSweater so I can find your version.
