This project started with a ball of wool I picked up during my Thursday knitting group. One day one of the librarians came over to our knitting group with a large basket of wool, said it had been donated to the library for the knitting group to use. It wasn't until we got to the bottom of the basket and found a signed note that we realised that the basket of wool had originally belonged to one of our members who had recently passed away. So of course I wanted to do something special with this wool, but I only had one ball.
I started thinking about what I wanted to make. I really wanted some sort of lightweight shrug that I could throw on just when I was getting cool, but didn't need a big jumper, so I decided on a lacy cardigan.
If course I couldn't find a pattern for exactly what I wanted so I just started looking for a lace pattern that I liked and found the no place like home scarf.
The next problem was figuring out how to translate the scarf pattern into a cardigan pattern. I started of course with a gauge swatch. I made it pretty big so that I could get an accurate idea if how much the lace would stretch when made up and found that 6 repeats of the pattern would fit across my back nicely, with three repeats for each front piece. The sleeves would need a three and a half repeats around. From there I could work upwards, creating raglan decreases at each shoulder. I drew out the pattern on graph paper, one stitch per square and then worked out how best to fit the pattern within those stitches and finally I was ready to start.
I undid my swatch gauge as I knew I would need all the yarn I could get, and then started knitting from the top down.
I did make a few mistakes in the lace pattern, but between the colour and the lace its not really noticeable so I didn't bother going back and fixing it.
I got down to the bottom of the armholes and joined the front and back, leaving the sleeves stitches on holders before I ran out of my ball of yarn. Thankfully the yarn is pretty common so a quick trip to the local Michaels store allowed me to pick up two more balls of the same yarn.
I decided to work on the arms first as they need to be a certain length, whereas if I run out of wool on the body I can just call it a cropped sweater. I did 5 repeats of the pattern to get to full length, then finished the sleeves with 6 rows of garter stitch.
The sleeves are just a tiny smidge too short, they have a tendency to ride up a bit, but as this cardigan is only really for keeping off the chill that's not too much of a problem.
The body of the cardigan was finished off in the same way with 5 repeats of the pattern, followed by 6 rows of garter stitch.
The center front band was created by slipping the first stitch of every row, then knitting the second stitch. The end of the row was finished with a knit stitch followed by a knit through the back loop stitch.
To finish the sweater I just needed to sew up the gaps under the arms, weave in all the loose ends and sew on 4 purple buttons I found in my button collection. The buttons are small enough that I don't need button holes, I just use one of the lace holes.
I did a quick steam block to stretch it out to the right width. It's quite snug across the chest, but the lace has enough stretch that there isn't really any issue.
I really like this cardigan. It's the perfect weight to bringing to a restaurant - I find the in summer restaurants are always way over air conditioned and I tend to freeze wearing summer clothes, this gives just enough coverage to take off the chill.
Beautiful!
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