Village Cryptid: The Cardigan

In August of last year I started knitting a cardigan. I am not the fastest knitter in the world, just going to put that out there but I did hope to have it finished by last winter. I spent ages going through patterns on Ravelry to find one suitable, long enough, fastened and had pockets. I eventually settled on a James C. Brett one, it doesn’t have pockets but I figured they’d be easy enough to add after the fact.

I really liked the tweediness of the one in the pattern pictures and so bought myself some tweedy yarn, King Cole Fashion Aran in the shade Orkney.

I bought this from Wool Warehouse.

Cracked on and it was going great guns, two fronts, a back and a pair of sleeves in not too much time, I mean it wasn’t finished by winter but, for me, it didn’t take that long. Looking at my Rav notes, in February it was time for the bit I was not looking forward to, the picking up of stitches for the border and collar. Yikes. I don’t mind the actual act of picking up and knitting, it’s the spacing, it’s getting the stitches all picked up evenly that is the pain in the bumbum for me. I use a ton of stitch markers to divide up the space and work out how many stitches are needed in between them and that seems to work okay.

A sleeve.

I got that done, (427 stitches), and knitted across them all, then just stopped. I’d got myself slightly bamboozled by how the collar was done but once I got it pictured in my head properly I could see how it worked. But I just didn’t feel like picking it up again.

It languished in my bag, making me feel slightly guilty every time I saw it, my other hibernating projects are put somewhere I can’t see them but this one I left out because I was really going to finish it. Then last week I just decided that I was going to finish it, picked it up, did about a million 1x1 ribbing rows and it’s done. The bind off in 1x1 rib nearly did me in though. Ends are woven in and the button is attached.