Anna's Summer Cardigan

Anna's Summer Cardigan

Welcome back guys!  How was your Thanksgiving?? Last week when I hit save on the blog post I completely forgot it was the last blog post before Thanksgiving and I forgot to wish you, so happy belated Thanksgiving!  I hope you spent a little time with friends and fam and ate some good food and if you decided to skip the whole thing and just relaxed for a few days, I hope you enjoyed that too.

I have not been up to a whole lot since I've been mostly trapped in my house.  Luckily for me knitting requires almost no effort so I've been taking a little time to clear up my WIP's.  Of course when I opened up the WIP bag this sweater was right on top of it.  The sigh of resignation was huge.  I've been chasing this sweater for a full year.  I checked.  I scrolled all the way through my photo feed and confirmed that I really did start this sweater in October of 2017 and for all sorts of reasons I just couldn't get it done.

I want to stress, though, that all of these reasons were my fault.  The pattern itself is great.  It's called Anna's Summer Cardigan by Petiteknit.  The sweater calls for a DK and ranges from 9-12 months all the way up to 6-7 years.  I knit it in our Superwash sport and made the largest size, which I, hilariously, forgot that I did because why would I make a size six sweater for a three year old?  Apparently I knew in advance that it would take me a year to knit and the kid would grow like a weed in the interim.  You want to know how I realized this mistake? I cast off the first sleeve and realized that my stitch count didn't match the stitch count on the body and had to cast it back on to adjust.  That wasn't even the first mistake that I made with this sweater.

The first one was not reading the pattern all the way through or else I would have known that it's written both bottom up and top down and I would have immediately chosen the top down version.  Instead, I cast on bottom up and before I realized my mistake, I was pot committed.  In hindsight, I'm glad it worked out that way because learning new things is cool, right?  When I was knitting it I definitely disagreed but now that I'm done and I've figured it all out, I'm ok with it. 

The second mistake was probably putting it down to give in to whatever new project I started.  The third, and probably the worst one, was taking the needles out of this project bag and NOT NOTING WHICH NEEDLES I KNIT IT WITH.  What a rookie mistake. That was the mistake that stalled this project the most.  To this moment right now I have no idea what needle I originally started this project with.  I have no idea why I took the needles out of this project or what I eventually did with them which might have triggered my memory as to what size needle I actually used.  So after knitting the body of this sweater I had to gauge swatch again to find the swatch that matched the body.  It was a big ol' mess and eventually I caved and decided since I normally go up a needle size and the pattern called for a size 4 needle, I'd just go up to a size 5 and see what happened.  And then I lost a skein of yarn.

(Knitting with DPN's because circulars were missing. Sigh.) 

So this sweater has been my white whale this whole year.  I've avoided it, and I've resigned myself to frogging it and finishing it at different times.  Even after I found the missing skein of yarn it felt like I was playing yarn chicken the whole time.  I was sure that I must have miscalculated the yardage.  I used three skeins of our Hubba Bubba and in the end I actually had 50 grams left.  And that's with me extending the sleeves an extra inch because her mom said her arms were already as long as the pattern called for and I wanted to give her a little bit of room to grow.

In the end I finished it.  Ahab got his whale and it's time to move on to something new.  And move on I did.  This yarn was supposed to be a Dahlia Cardigan in 2016 but after I knit the lace panel and couldn't figure out the rest of the pattern, it was tucked into a bin for future use.  After that it was supposed to be a Granito sweater but I couldn't figure that out either so now it's a Party Top.  I've made some pretty decent headway and I'm kind of hoping that it'll be done for the Woodstock Fleece Festival this weekend.

Speaking of which, I will not be there.  I have FOMO already just thinking of Ash at a show without me.  I'm quite heartbroken.  If you guys are in the area make sure you guys stop by and say hi to Ash!  You guys will get a chance to meet Kyle, Ashley's brother, who's super awesome too so you might not even miss me! 

That's it for me for this week! Until we speak again, PEACE to you and yours and as always, happy knitting! 

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1 comment

Wow, Ashley that sweater is gorgeous!!! The girls are going to LOVE it.

Gina LaPointe

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