FibreJoy's Blog

I had started knitting Laura Chau’s ‘Monday Morning Cardigan‘ and got to the point where I stopped knitting the body, which has a bottom up construction, to start the sleeves. I was half way the first sleeve when I doubted my memory and went to see how much yarn I had left.

I should have done that before! The pattern calls for about 1,320 yards in size 3 (out of 8 different sizes) and I discovered I only had about 1,210 (11 skeins of Knit Picks ‘Wool of the Andes’ which comes in 110 yards per skein)… darn! The thing is that I wanted this cardigan to have full length sleeves, so I could not cut down in the size of the sleeves to make it up for the lack of yarn.

For some reason I thought I had 14 skeins, but I never checked to realize the bag only contained 11… what a silly mistake…

On the positive side -probably the only one I see- I am thinking of restarting this cardigan going 2 sizes down, as I found it comes really big, larger than I had planned if using the measurements of the sizes described in the pattern, and I think that after blocking it, it will stretch a bit because of the yarn. Also, if I do that, I should be able to use less than the 1,100 yards that are called for size 1, as I want to make the sleeves narrower, the pattern is written in a way that makes the sleeves really big. I would still like to have full length sleeves though.

Oh well… I need to remember to re-check how much yarn I have BEFORE starting any large project!

I had this, before ‘I saw the light’:

Now that I finished unraveling it, I have this:

Right now I think I will leave this project aside for a while, as I’ve started what will be my first ‘steek’ project -I had been wanting to try this technique, where you knit the piece in the round, then use a sewing machine and do a good 2 rows of straight stitch on both sides of what will become your cut, then do the actual cut in the front, turning it from a sweater into a cardigan. My knitting readers will most probably know what ‘steeking’ is, but if you are not a knitter and would like to know what I am talking about, check out this video from YouTube. In this case, the cutting of the sweater is very impressive, because the whole piece is done in colourwork, using several different yarns… yikes! Also, the knitter says that instead of using a sewing machine to ‘reinforce’ the stitches before doing the cutting so the sweater does not unravel later, she did a crochet reinforcement.

I’ve chosen the ‘Héla – 2 and 3 colour Cardigan’ from ‘Ístex Online Patterns‘, a website specialized in patterns for Icelandic yarn. I had some Létt-Lopi yarn remaining from my ‘Owls’, remember?

The finished Héla cardi might look a bit similar to my Owls, because I still have more gray than green, and I am planning to do the colourwork in the yoke following the pattern, but that is not an issue, as I want to have a gray cardigan anyway.

This is what I have so far:

I am now in the not-so-exciting part of plain stockinette stitch for the whole body, which is bottom up until you reach the sleeves. Then, after knitting the sleeves separately, there is where the fun part begins, the 2 colour yoke and then the steek/cut.

I’ve always found this yarn a bit harsh to the skin, but as it happened when I knitted ‘Owls’, after washing the sweater in Eucalan, leaving it for a few hours in the water, and a good blocking, it turns to be pretty soft and the yarn is indeed very warm.

Stay tuned for more as this WIP progresses!