I feel like I’ve been neglecting you all lately. I promise it’s not
intentional, I was just mired in my first true foray into non-monogamous
knitting (I hated it) and was waiting until I had anything finished (or
even remotely finished) to make an update. Consequently, I have about 5
posts in a row that I’m going to need to make as I’ve been doing ALL
THE THINGS. I’ll try to space them out a bit so you don’t get them all
at once.
The first thing I want to talk about is something I think I mentioned once before, the Men’s Striped Cardigan that I made for my SO for our anniversary. It’s out of Knit Picks CotLin
(because I really wanted to knit with Knit Picks CotLin) and it turned
out pretty well, despite me having a lot of struggles with the pattern
(part my fault, part the pattern’s fault) and having to rip out the
sleeve THREE TIMES (though it turns out that the third time I ripped it
out, I didn’t actually have to rip it out, the pattern was just
confusing). I also learned that although I don’t usually mind
finishing/seaming, I DO hate seaming things with stripes because making
the sleeve stripes line up with the yoke stripes was an exercise in
madness. Because of the sleeve setbacks, I was worried I wouldn’t finish
it by our anniversary, so I dropped all the other projects I had in
progress (monogamy ftw) and basically did nothing with my free time but
knit that sweater for about a week and a half. I finished weaving in all
the ends at around 10:30pm on May 14 (the day before our anniversary).
So, technically it was finished on time, but the seams were so horridly
bunched up that I knew I needed to block it, so he couldn’t wear it
right away. He did wear it to the fibre festival we attended this Sunday
(more on that in a later post) and it fits him well and he likes it
well enough that I think he’ll actually wear it, so I’m counting it a
win. That means that I have successfully knit him THREE sweaters now and
I have successfully knit myself two. Yep.
Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of him wearing the cardigan (despite
the fact that I was with him all day yesterday when he had it on), so
here’s a photo of it blocking.
I was really excited to use the CotLin yarn after listening to the
Knit Picks podcast where they were talking about the yarn. I’d never
knit with cotton yarn at all before, so it was a new experience for me
to knit with yarn that didn’t have much elasticity to it and had a lot
of stretch. I think I already mentioned that I had to switch to bamboo
needles because the cotton yarn and the aluminum needles were not
agreeing with one another. Once I switched to the bamboo, all went well.
I didn’t LOVE the CotLin as much as I hoped I would, but I think it’s a
pretty great yarn to knit with. It helps that the pattern I chose was
designed with a cotton yarn, so I didn’t have to worry too much about
how it would stretch with gravity (although I don’t know yet since SO
has only worn it once), but the linen seems to help it keep a bit of
integrity. The stitch definition is nice and it definitely wasn’t hard
on my hands while I was knitting (something else I’ve heard about cotton
yarns). I LOVE the colours that SO picked (Cashew – a lovely toasty tan colour, and Planetarium
– a rich navy blue with the slightest bit of a greenish hue and almost a
little sheen that’s basically the colour of the midnight sky) and I
have quite a bit of yarn leftover (especially in the blue) so I’m
thinking about other things I can make (perhaps for ME) in the yarn. I
wish I had more of the tan left because I think it would be a great
neutral for me to make another short-sleeved layering cardigan with, but
I definitely don’t have enough of the tan for a sweater. The blue
however …
The only thing I’d caution about when knitting this is that when I
made it (in XL, not sure if smaller sizes also have this problem)
according to the pattern dimensions, the armpit shaping starts a bit
low, unless you’re planning on wearing a dress shirt or bigger shirt
underneath it, and the sleeve lengths (at least on my SO) were about 3”
too long if you made the sweater as written (see: why I had to rip back
the sleeve the second time), so you might want to measure and adjust as
needed.
I might knit this again, but not for a while and definitely not in
stripes. Also, I forgot how much longer it takes me to make sweaters for
SO because he is so much bigger than me! Yet somehow, he is the one
that has all the sweaters that fit and I am the one with a bunch of
sweaters in the “things that need to be re-knit” pile. Whatever.