Ruthless Knitting

Thank you for all the kind comments about my essay yesterday. Moving on to cheerier subjects, I present the Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan:

Pattern: Puff-Sleeved Feminine Cardigan from Fitted Knits by Stefanie Japel
Size: 34″ bust, 32″ waist, 19.5″ length, 10″ to armpit
Yarn: leftover Elizabeth Austen Andes and Araucania Nature Wool, both overdyed blue (see the full story here)
Yardage: 2.5 skeins of Andes (maybe 430 yards?); 1 skein Araucania (maybe 200 yards?)
Yarn Source: eBay; Webs
Needles: US size 4 and 6 26″ bamboo circulars
Gauge: 21 stitches and 30 rows over 4″ (but blocked to gauge)
Notes: This was a fun knit. Other than changing the yarn and making it a two-color sweater, I didn’t modify much. I think I added a few inches of length below the underarm and I might have done less waist shaping than the pattern called for — or maybe I just blocked it a bit larger at the waist, I can’t remember. I knit most of this very quickly in a bit of a fog one weekend while David was out of town and I was watching a lot of movies. I did the rest of the knitting in dribs and drabs after he returned home, then waited for my buttons to arrive to finish up. (I ordered the buttons from the Button Drawer, which is a great source for those of us whose local button selection is poor.) This is the first adult-size sweater I have knit in one piece from the top down, and though I enjoyed it, my inclination is to stick with knitting sweaters in pieces. I like to be able to measure my progress in small increments, so a one-piece sweater is a bit of a slog for me. Still, being able to figure out the sizing as you go is pretty neat.

I’m quite pleased with how this little sweater came out. The only problem is that the button band is a bit gappy, just as it is in the photo in the book. I think this is the result of how the band is constructed — namely that it’s a fairly narrow band on a fitted sweater — rather than the result of the sweater’s being too tight. At first, it didn’t really bother me, but when I saw how it looked in my pictures I decided I ought to do something about it. I have sufficient yarn to make the bands a bit wider, but I’m doubtful that will make any appreciable difference. Any suggestions? Is this just the nature of the beast?

The other way in which my cardigan differs from the one in the book’s photo is that my sleeves aren’t as puffy due to the fact that my shoulders are considerably wider than the model’s and my upper arms larger. (Like most models, she is a wee little thing.) This is fine with me, too, as I was a little worried that the sleeves would be too puffy. But if you’re thinking of knitting this sweater and you want extreme puffiness, you might consider carefully whether your shoulder and arm size requires some sizing up, which would be easy enough to execute as long as you plan ahead a bit.

I’m still not sure whether I will wear this much. I like it, but “puff-sleeved” and “feminine” are both major departures from my normal way of dressing, and I’ve also yet to determine whether there is any place for a short-sleeved wool sweater in the spectrum of Wisconsin weather. I didn’t help matters by making the sweater even more unique by doing it in two colors. The result is very pleasing to me visually, but we will have to wait and see whether it finds a place in my wardrobe.

The only other thing to note about this sweater is that it took only two and a half skeins of Andes yarn. For those of you who are keeping track, please note that this means that I have now knit two sweaters from the bag of ten skeins that I bought on eBay, I have given one skein away, and I have used one skein up on swatches. Yet I have a bit more than two skeins left. Long live the Andes yarn!

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Edited to add: I solved the button band problem to my satisfaction by adding hems. The bands still scallop a bit between the buttons, but they don’t gape open at all. The scalloping is kind of nice, since it echoes the lower edge.

For anyone interested in trying it, I largely followed the explanation for creating a hem given by Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitting without Tears. First, I removed all the buttons. Then, using the same size needle I used for the button bands and some leftover fingering-weight yarn (to reduce the bulk), I picked up and knit along the edge of the band, putting the needle through the the half of each bound-off stitch that was closer to the inside of the sweater. On the next row, I purled across and decreased about 10 percent of the stitches by purling eight and purling two together across. On the button side, I continued in stockinette until the hem was as wide as the original button band (about eight rows) and bound off. On the buttonhole side, I continued in stockinette until I had added half the needed width (about four rows), made buttonholes directly behind the existing buttonholes — checking each as I went along to ensure they lined up — and then finished as on the other side. I hand-stitched the bound off edges down to the seams where the original buttonbands were picked up, being sure to sew through the top half of the bound-off edge stitch rather than the bottom half, since it looks neater that way. Finally, I sewed the buttons back on. I have not done anything to connect the two buttonholes in each set together, since they seem to work just fine separately.