FO: Featherweight

Pattern: Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig
Yarn: 80 gr. of Zephyr wool/silk in Sable
Needles: 3mm

It's finished, dry and I'm wearing it right now. Although I'm not completely convinced by the colour (a rusty, coppery brown), I absolutely love everything else about it. It's soft, light, drapy and warm and I never want to take it off!

Apart from knitting the sleeves flat, I made another minor modification: I knit the edges in seed stitch so they wouldn't curl. I was a bit afraid that the grafted edges would show, but after blocking I can only tell if I look at it from less than 5 cm.

I'm glad this one is finally out of the way, because now I can finally justify starting on one of the other three (or was it four?) sweaters I have the yarn for!

Battle of the Sleeves

Tonight I finally finished my Featherweight Cardigan. I've had the body finished since the summer, but somehow the sleeves wouldn't come along. I started off on magic loop, my favourite way of working small things in the round. Unfortunately it's not so much a favourite with tiny yarn on bigger needles. There was horrible laddering and it was altogether to fiddly. Knitting the sleeves flat on circulars was no better.

Next up were the DPNs. Again, not so much of a problem if the needles aren't a little big for the yarn. I got about a centimeter further than with the circular and gave up, this time for a month or two. As a last resort I got a tiny (30 cm) circular needle. This was even more fiddly and annoying than either of the other options. The cardigan went back into time-out and by this time I was afraid it would never come out again, until I found a way to get them done.

I was going to knit the sleeves flat, bottom up. Then, I'd graft them to the live stitches at the shoulder and seam them closed. It might be the most inefficient way to knit the sleeves on a top down raglan, but it was the only way it'd get done. And I was right, from the moment I cast on the first sleeve, it took less than a week to have the whole thing seamed and ready to go.

It's around midnight now, so the pictures will have to wait until daylight.