Monday, March 19, 2012

The Big Cardigan Set-Back.

Today I planned on showing you the cardigan I started working on, the Tempest cardigan from Knitty. I even thought I might possibly be able to show a completed or mostly-completed back (it's knit in pieces).

Well, as I was working on it, I really felt like it was getting much too long for the back of a cardigan, especially based on the picture. After decreasing for the sleeves, I decided to stop because I realized it was already the length that the finished back needed to be.



This pattern is for a striped cardigan, but I decided to only work with one colorway. Therefore, I've been having to do a bit more counting than I should because the pattern goes off of knitting X amount of stripes for certain sections. At the beginning of the back pattern, it says to knit 3 stripes using the large stripe pattern (there are 2 stripe patterns). One stripe repeat consists of 2 stripes, and I interpreted the "knit 3 stripes" as "knit 3 stripe repeats". Meaning I knit an extra 36 rows before the waist shaping than I needed to. Oh, and since it's hand painted yarn (Araucania), I'm switching between two skeins every two rows so that it's more blended and doesn't pool so much, but it makes it much more of a pain to unravel.

I had to rip back a whopping fifteen inches.



So, I have ripped it back and finally gotten back on track. I'm at the waist shaping currently, but I've kind of lost my steam on knitting this. I think it might need a break for a day or two.