Progress

My striped cardigan is coming along slowly, but surely. So far, I’m just about done with the first sleeve, and since I don’t have much to share in terms of the actual knitting, I wanted to talk a bit more about my thoughts behind creating this sweater.

I already went over the basics: plain cardigan, stripes. With such a simple recipe, the first thought might be to do it top-down raglan style to avoid seams and trying to match stripes. I did consider it, but when it came down to it, I knew that when it’s comes to straight-forward pieces, the details became more important. PI know a lot of people don’t find seams necessary, and that’s fine, but to me, they add a bit of structure to a garment, and make a garment look  more polished and professional. Since I’m working with a light drapey fabric, this became even more important.

That meant I had to figure out how to make that work with the stripes. I’ve heard seaming stripes is surprisingly difficult, and I had no idea how to match the stripes across the sleeve cap, but I decided to tackle it anyway. I had a hard time finding resources online, so I worked it all out myself. I spent a couple of days graphing out the sleeve caps (more about that later, once I know whether it’s going to work out). I also practised sewing up the stripes on swatches, and came up with a neat little trick to make them match perfectly every time.

The other thing did was to spend a lot of time researching cast-ons and cast-offs. I was set on 2×2 ribbing, and I wanted the cast-on and cast-off edges to match perfectly, while still looking good with the ribbing. Although I love the look of the tubular cast-on for 1×1 ribbing, I’m not overly fond of the 2×2 version. Of course, after countless swatches, I decided to go with 1×1 ribbing anyway, which let me use the tubular cast-on. Doesn’t it look pretty? To me, it’s details like these that take a sweater from just boring to simple, and from homemade to handmade.

Now, let’s just hope the rest of my math works out.