Sweetheart Cardigan Completed

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Deborah Cooke

This week’s knitting post is a few days early, but things are a bit upside down with the blog tour etc. It’s done so you get to see it now.

This is the Sweetheart cardigan – the pattern specifies regular KidSilk Haze. Instead, I knit mine with solid KSH on the borders and Kidsilk Haze Stripe for the main part of the body. I used the Forest colourway for the KSH Stripe and the borders are in Nightly, which is solid navy. Here it is:

It still needs to be blocked, but looks pretty good already. 🙂

I showed you the back of this sweater in an earlier post here on the blog, which is right here.

This sweater has a two-piece cuff, which closes with three buttons. This required a bit of fiddling, because I wanted the striping to come out similarly on both sides of the cuff. I knit one side (the front cuff) then rummaged through my remaining KSH Stripe to find a good match for the other side of the cuff. This is the first one I did – the second one, which you can see in the picture above, came out even better.The other modification I made was adding two more buttons to the front – I used seven instead of the specified five. I thought the five buttons looked too far apart compared to the cuffs.

I’m pretty happy with this sweater and I’m thinking of making another one in another colourway – but not until the fall. (KSH is definitely a yarn to knit when the weather is cool!) It’s an amazing yarn – so light and yet so very warm. This will be a great sweater for travelling, or to take along “just in case”. The pattern as written does require a lot of finishing, but there’s one change I’ll make to reduce that. The front button bands are knit separately and then seamed to the front – when I knit another one, I’ll just knit them in as I go.

What do you think?

Sonny Vest

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Deborah Cooke

Here’s a finished project to celebrate the end of the week. This vest is for Mr. Math and is knit of Rowan’s Colourscape Chunky. The colourways were designed by Kaffe Fassett, so you can imagine that I’ve been fingering this yarn (and lusting after it) since it was introduced. It’s a single ply chunky weight yarn, spun of merino – and now it’s discontinued.

Here’s the vest:

The pattern is called Sonny, from the Colourscape Folk Collection pattern book. I knit it almost 2 inches longer because Mr. Math is tall. It’s even knit in the same colourway as in the book – Camouflage – and Mr. Math is very happy with it. It was a pretty quick knit.

The yarn is fabulous. It has so many more colours than even show in the photograph. And it’s soft. I hope it doesn’t pill as single plies often do, but we’ll see. On the one hand, I’m disappointed that it’s discontinued because that means it will eventually disappear from the world. On the other hand, the fact that it’s discontinued means that it’s on sale at a lot of outlets, and that price drop makes it easier to acquire.

I’d bought four skeins – the pattern calls for three – thinking I might need more for the extra length. I did go into the fourth ball to play matchy matchy on the second side of the v-front, but all my bits together weigh more than one skein. Theoretically, I could have bought just three skeins, but I do like the matchy matchy. And I love the orange on the neck ribbing. I was hoping for that!

Sweetheart Cardigan

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Deborah Cooke

Here’s a project I have on the needles right now, which I’m loving to bits. This is the Sweetheart Cardigan from Rowan, knit in Kidsilk Haze Stripe in the Forest colourway.

This is the back.

It’s fine knitting, but I really like how the colours are evolving. Not exactly striped, but not exactly not-striped either. I’m letting the stripes evolve as they come off the ball, instead of letting my inner Fussy Knitter manage them into matching. The left front, which I’ve cast on now, starts with the green. The right front, looking at the ball, will start with the red. (I will deal with this and love it. I will.)

The button bands are knit separately from the fronts in this pattern, and I didn’t want another gradation of colour up the fronts. So, I decided to knit all of the edges in solid navy Kidsilk Haze, which I had in my stash. That means casting on in navy on fronts and back and sleeves, then using the navy up the fronts and around the neckline. I’m not sure that it’s precisely the same navy as in the stripe, but there are so many blues that it looks okay.

Also, I found some buttons in my stash (ha ha!) that are abalone, with similar blues, greys and greens. Some of them even have a glimmer of a reddish tone. They are smaller than specified by the pattern, so I think I’ll use seven up the front instead of five. Not sure about the specified three on each cuff. I’ll have to see what it looks like.

What do you think?

Plum Cordial

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Deborah Cooke

This is a quick project that I finished last weekend. In the middle of finishing so many big projects, I needed the encouragement of something that could be knit in a hurry.

The pattern is called Cordial from Rowan magazine, and it’s knit in Rowan Big Wool. Here’s mine:

I did make one modification to the pattern. You knit the cardi from the front bottom, over the shoulders to the back hem. The only seaming is the underarm seams. As it’s written, the cable runs over the shoulder and down the back, and as it’s written, the back doesn’t mirror the front. In my side, the cable would have ended in the middle of a diamond at the back hem. I knew this would bug me. Also those two little V’s between the diamonds would be upside down on the back. This would also annoy me.

So, I reworked the chart to keep knitting over the shoulder but to have the V’s end up right side up on the back. I also knit to the end of a full diamond at the shoulder, then switched to my upside down chart. The back of my Cordial looks just like the front, and that makes me happy.

It was maybe a little on the loose side when it was done, but not enough to be worth frogging and reknitting. When I washed it to block it, though, it grew and grew and grew. Yikes! I think this might be a merino thing – its springiness uncoils when wet – but it freaked me out a bit. I wrapped it in a towel and pressed out as much moisture as possible, laid it flat and worried about it for a few hours – then I put it in the dryer. I only left it for a couple of minutes at a time and checked it obsessively. It is a little bit felted, which I like, and fits perfectly now.

Ha. I really like it. And now back to finishing those UFO’s…

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Sweetheart Cardigan Completed

Sonny Vest

Sweetheart Cardigan

Plum Cordial