cardigan – eternal magpie

Satisfying Saturday

Now this is what I call a bargain. Paul and I popped into our local church’s fair on the way home from the Post Office, where I managed to pick up this excellent book for the princely sum of TEN PENCE. I had a quick flick through, and suddenly the mysteries of dart manipulation seem a lot clearer. Once the Vintage Night’s out of the way, I feel inspired to draft myself a new bodice sloper and do some experiments!

And this, the product of about a week’s knitting (on and off) is the yoke of a Miette cardigan in a lovely mottled pink yarn with a sparkly strand running through it. I’d thought that seeing everyone else’s photos from Me-Made May would make me want to rush out and buy lots of sewing patterns. Thankfully that’s not the case, but seeing lots of different versions of this cardigan did make me want to cast on immediately! It’s a cropped style, which is good for me as I’m very short-waisted, and also good as I don’t really have enough yarn for the pattern. It’s supposed to have three-quarter length sleeves, but I’m definitely going to end up with short ones. Once I’ve finished the body, I’ll knit the neck and front bands. Then I’ll know I can use all the remaining yarn on the sleeves – assuming there is some!

I don’t know whether I’ll get it finished in time to wear it as part of Me-Made May, but I’m going to give it a good try.

(Oh, and both of these photos are also on Instagram. If you’d like to follow me there, I’m “inexplicableemporium”.)

Ups and downs

So, last Friday was Valentine’s Day. In our continued tradition of unequal gift-giving, I gave my husband a card, and he gave me an iPad! Admittedly he was going to give me the iPad anyway – he’s just upgraded to a new one, and I’ve inherited his old one with a nice new case. But he certainly gained a great deal of brownie points by wrapping it up in lovely paper!

I’ve been downloading lots of exciting new apps, mostly ones for drawing and sketching with. I’ve chosen a few free ones that I can try out, before I decide which ones I like best and want to pay for. The drawing above was done with an app called Sketches, and it mirrors the theme of this past week. It’s titled “My Face Hurts”.

Also on Valentine’s Day, I had to go to the dentist. Luckily we didn’t have a romantic meal planned for the evening, because I ended up having a tooth taken out! Four days later it’s still really painful, and the fibromyalgia doesn’t like it at all. Much to my frustration my face now acts as a warning beacon when I’m in a lot of pain, and this is how I came home from work today. Lovely! Given that I have a public-facing job, and it’s half term this week, I can only hope that I’m not scaring too many children away from the museum!

This rather different picture of me, from all the way back in 2008, is the cover photo for the first knitting pattern I designed. After a comment left on the blog by someone trying to track down a copy, I was prompted to open my own Ravelry store, and this is currently the only pattern in it.

I do have three existing patterns that I can add (also available in the Tutorials section to the right there), but I need to work out how to do that without duplicating the original patterns, as I seem to have done with this cardigan. I also have two completely new patterns ready and waiting, but they’re both waiting for photographs. All of my test knits were given away as Christmas presents, so I need to sit down and knit some new ones so that I can have a photo shoot. The temptation to dye my hair pink for the occasion is now extremely high!

New Old Cardigan

This morning I rediscovered the gathering foot for my sewing machine, and combined it with Pretty Jane’s continuous bias tape tutorial.

Half a metre of fabric turned into around twelve metres of tape, which I then ran through the gathering foot. This resulted in about four and a half metres of pretty ruffled trim! It’s about 4cm wide, and I ran both long edges through the overlocker. This gives it a nice finish, and also a little extra wiggle as the bias edges stretch a bit.

I wanted to use my lovely new ruffle straight away, so I decided to re-vamp a very old cardigan. My Mum knitted this for me many years ago (I might even have worn it to school!), and the cuffs had become very threadbare.

Once I’d chopped off the worst of the unravelling cuffs and run them through the overlocker, I simply zig-zagged a length of ruffle into place. That looked a bit silly on its own, so I added some matching buttons. Good, but still nowhere near ruffly enough, so I decided to go a bit mad and stitch the ruffled trim all the way around the neck. Much better!

I was looking at the bias tape tutorial because I have quite a lot of small pieces of fabric lying around in the Shed, and I wanted to find a use for them. Now I’ve got the hang of it I’m planning to make some lengths of bias tape in different prints and patterns, and see about resurrecting my old Etsy shop. I have lots of vintage buttons that I’m never going to use, so I was thinking about listing them, along with some covered buttons and bias tape, and having a little haberdashery clear-out. Chances of this happening soon are minimal, but I’m thinking about it, and that’s a start!

Long-Sleeved Eve

This is Eve, in Colinette Giotto.

I finished knitting it about six weeks ago, it’s just taken me that long to get around to sewing all the bits together. For those of you on Ravelry, you can see the details here.

It’s a mash-up of two versions of the Eve pattern – the short body from one, and the long sleeves from the other. The short sleeved version took 3 skeins, and this only took one extra. If you were making anything above a 36″ chest you’d definitely need five skeins. I find this ribbon style yarn quite easy to knit with, and the cardigan’s very light and pleasantly drapey. It does tend to go a bit baggy when you wash it, so I knitted a smaller size than I would normally.

I never follow Colinette’s instructions to “stripe” their yarns to avoid pooling, partly because I don’t mind too much how the colours come out and partly because I’m too lazy to wrangle two balls of wool at once if I don’t have to. I’m not totally convinced by the resulting fabric here, which looks like a cross between a zebra and an untuned television. It’s an excellent summer cardigan though, and I’m sure I’ll get plenty of wear out of it. I wear my blue one quite a lot.

Colinette Cate Cardigan

I knitted this cardigan at record speed, so that I could wear it to a wedding back in June. The yarn is Rowan Polar, and it had a previous life as a tank top from Teva Durham’s Loop-D-Loop book. I love the colour, but I have to confess that I’m not a huge fan of the yarn itself. It has a halo of alpaca fluff that sheds all over the place, and you can see that it’s already gone very bobbly under the arms.

I do like the style of the cardigan, although I usually wear it untied as the knot is quite bulky. I also want to add a piece of ribbon across the back, to stop it from stretching and slipping off my shoulders. I’d like to either amend the pattern or maybe find one that’s already written for DK yarn, to make a lighter weight cardigan. I’m not sure I have the attention span to knit this style of cardigan in a lighter yarn though – the draped fronts would take forever!

HUGGIES!

This is a knitting pattern from 1977. My sister and I (and probably my Mum and Dad as well) wore many incarnations of this cardigan over the years, all knitted by my Mum.

Once you’ve stopped laughing at the extremely dated styling on the pattern cover, this is actually a really nice cardigan. It can be knitted either in chunky yarn, or with two strands of double knitting held together. You can choose between a collar or a hood. It doesn’t give instructions for pockets, but I think if I knitted this again, I’d add them.

I think the only thing I’d do differently is the buttonholes. The moss stitch border is five stitches wide, but you make the buttonholes only one stitch away from the edge. I think I’d move them over, just by one more stitch, to give the button band a bit more stability. Admittedly I have sewn on rather large and heavy buttons, so I might reinforce the bands on this one with a strip of fabric.

I did really want to knit the hood, but it turned out that twelve balls of Debbie Bliss Soho wasn’t quite enough. Just one more ball would have done the hood, and probably a pair of pockets as well. One of the problems with older patterns is that they don’t give the weight or yardage of the specified yarn, so you just have to try and make an educated guess.

Now I just need to decide which yarn I want to use for my next one…

Fruit Salad

I fell in love with this wool back in December. John Lewis were having a clearance sale, and I was tempted into buying a whole jumper’s worth.

The yarn is Debbie Bliss Soho, in colourway 16. I wouldn’t normally go for yellows and oranges, but the colours reminded me so much of those little Fruit Salad chews I used to get entangled in my braces as a child that I couldn’t resist!

At first I thought the wool was going to turn into a pullover with a deep v-neck. Then I spotted these buttons, hard and translucent like delicious boiled sweets, and knew that they’d be perfect for a chunky cardigan. I spent a good while trying to choose between the pink and the orange and, uncharacteristically for me, I left the pink ones behind.

Now I just need to find the time to break out the coloured pencils, and draw up a design for a Fruit Salad cardigan, with boiled sweet buttons. Irresistible!

Knitting time already?

It can’t be, surely? I haven’t finished knitting the socks from last month’s Simply Knitting, and Issue 44 has just dropped through my door!

Actually it didn’t so much drop through the door as fight with the postman to be wrestled through the letterbox, as the free gift this issue was a set of butterfly clips. (The down side of subscribing? You don’t get a choice of gift colour. I’d have chosen the pink ones!) You’re supposed to use them for holding the seams of your knitting together as you sew it up. Of course, the first thing I did was try one out in my hair!

There are two patterns this month which immediately make me want to rush out and buy yarn.

The first is a child’s cardigan, called “Just Peachy”.

The pattern goes up to age 11-12, but it has quite a lot of design ease (see how the cardigan is quite loose in the picture?), so the age 7-8 years is actually a perfectly snug fit for me! I’m very short-waisted so the back is already the ideal length, and all I’d have to do is lengthen the sleeves by about four inches. A single sparkly button or a silky ribbon at the top, and you’ve got a pretty summer cardi. I wonder whether John Lewis has any Kidsilk Night left in the sale…?

I also fell in love with the cardigan on the cover, and was wondering whether I might have just enough of my poor neglected Debbie Bliss Cathay to make this in light pink.

My favourite thing about this pattern? Right there on the picture – “Pattern in sizes 8-32!” The smallest size fits a 32″ chest, and the largest is 54″. I know that a few of the American knitting magazines include larger sizes, but their patterns often look like an enormous woolly sack. It’s so nice to see a pretty knitting pattern in such a wide range of sizes.

Mind you, it isn’t half complicated!

I received a survey last week, regarding a potential new knitting magazine aimed at intermediate or experienced knitters. I enthusiastically answered all of the questions saying, “yes! I would love to knit more complicated and adventurous things!”.

Then I looked at this cardigan, and my brain fell out of my ear.

The front panels are a twelve-row pattern, featuring twisted stitches for which I didn’t even recognise the abbreviations! Thankfully there is a helpful key to explain how you work “tw2, P4, tw2, twF, P1, twF, P5, tw2, P4, tw2”, which is the first row!

Perhaps I’ll start with the children’s cardigan. A four-row lace pattern I can probably manage, if I sit down and concentrate on it properly. (Lace is not my strong point.)

Maybe I ought to finish my socks first. Or my summer jumper.

I might even get around to sewing the zip into my green cardigan, taking a photo and actually publishing the pattern for you, one of these days…

Tag: cardigan

Satisfying Saturday

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Ups and downs

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New Old Cardigan

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Long-Sleeved Eve

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Colinette Cate Cardigan

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HUGGIES!

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Fruit Salad

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Knitting time already?

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