Posted: September 19th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: malabrigo, projects: featherweight cardigan, sweaters, things i knit, yarn i use | Tags: blue, cardigan, featherweight, featherweight cardigan, handknit, handmade, knit, knitting, malabrigo, malabrigo lace | 1 Comment »
It’s done! My sweater! It’s so done.
Pattern: Featherweight Cardigan! I knit the size small, but it’s possible I could have sized it down a little – the finished product is a little wide for me in the shoulders, and has a tendency to slouch off and look a little baggier than I’d like.
Yarn: Malabrigo Lace, in Azul Bolita – close to 2 skeins. (I bought three, and worked from two simultaneously from the sleeves, but I think my leftovers add up to a full skein.)
Needles: 4mm Addi Lace circular
I did a little bit of modifying to this pattern, but really not a lot. I had big plans, when I started, to knit this up from the collar with a hood, but by the time I got there I was just so sick of knitting laceweight yarn, I couldn’t bring myself to make it an even bigger project.
As a lot of people on Ravelry have mentioned – and as should be pretty obvious from the design of the pattern – the collar will curl, since it’s unbordered stockinette. I tried to fix this, a little bit, by adding in a half-inch of Feather and Fan lace to the edge of the collar. I saw a lot of sweaters where people went all-out with this, bordering the cuffs and the hem the same way, but I wasn’t together enough to think of it until the cuffs and hem were already knit, so – my sweater isn’t quite that pretty. Such is life.
I am, however, a little in love with it all the same. It’s so soft, shockingly warm, and so light it feels like I’m not wearing anything at all. (Possibly because, as you can see, it barely touches me anywhere. So floaty!) I definitely forsee myself getting a whole lot of use out of this.
Posted: September 14th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: malabrigo, projects: featherweight cardigan, sweaters, things i knit, yarn i use | Tags: blue, craft, featherweight cardigan, handmade, knit, knitting, laceweight, malabrigo, malabrigo lace | 1 Comment »
I don’t know if “suck it” is really an appropriate knitting term, but that’s sort of what I want to shout right now. In all caps. At, uh, this.
It’s made of two skeins of Malabrigo Lace, and it’s so, so soft, and if you flatten it out it turns into this.
Which happens to be what a Featherweight cardigan looks like, when it’s off the needles and finished and ready to be blocked. Seriously, this is so exciting. I feel like I’ve won something, it’s such a relief to have this finished (just in time for the right weather to wear it!) and off the needles and done (ish).
Song of the Entry: Taylor Swift – Forever & Always (Listen)
Posted: September 4th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: lorna's laces shepherd worsted, mittens, projects: bella's mittens, things i knit, yarn i use | Tags: bella's mittens, crafty, finished knits, handmade, knit, knitting, mittens, twilight | 1 Comment »
I appear to be knitting projects faster than I can find time to blog about them. This is, on the one hand, kind of awesome, and I can’t really complain about how many new wool additions I’ve made to my wardrobe. (If only it was winter.) On the other hand, it’s possibly a sign that I should start knitting bigger projects that take me a little longer.
Either way, the mittens I teased in my last entry are completely, 100% done. After last winter – a winter I spent with my hands jammed into my pockets, completely mittenless – I was determined to have at least one pair of handmade wool mittens for this year, and that appears to have happened.
Pattern: As Julie guessed right off, these are Bella’s Mittens – so named because they’re a pattern written to match the mittens Bella wore in the Twilight movie. While ordinarily, the very fact of that would make me balk, I am a complete sucker for horseshoe cables. So, there you go.
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, in Blackberry. These mittens used maybe a third of a skein.
Needles: 5mm dpns
I modified the pattern a little bit – as written, the mitts are actually these forearm-length gauntlets, which doesn’t suit my style at all, so I shortened them. (I did this by casting on 33 stitches instead of 43, and starting the cuff at Row 34, instead of Row 1. I worked six even rounds and one cable round, then followed rows 34-39 as written, leaving a much shorter cuff with only two cable repeats, instead of eight or so like the pattern called for.)
It is very hard to take a picture of your own wrist with an SLR camera, but that’s what they look like on my hands. They’re purple, and squishy, and they made a deeply satisfying project.
Now, of course, it’s time to start knitting something that’s going to take me a little longer.
