Last week I finally decided to buckle down and finish this sweater! Sooooooo glad that I did!
I started knitting this sweater very enthusiastically on August 11th 2009, by August 20th I had two completed fronts and one almost completed back, then everything went quiet. I don't know what happened, I loved the sweater, loved the colours, I knew that I wanted to shorten the sleeves and that they wouldn't even take that long to knit, yet still, it lay ignored in the basket of forgotten knitting for over 5 months! I couldn't handle the guilt of not finishing such a fun and pretty piece of knitting, so I dug it out and made a vow not to not knit anything else until is was done! It only took a couple of days to knit the sleeves and the button band, then I found the perfect buttons and the rest is history! I wore it both Friday and Saturday to make up for lost time!
I love the details on this sweater, the row of garter stitch between the ribbing of the collar and the smooth knitted fabric of the body, the way the decreases are placed 3 stitches in from the sides and form a crisp line.
The pretty oil-slick buttons that work really well with the colours that fell in the button band.
This sweater used two full skeins of Kureyon Sock in colourway 220. I've knit a sweater in Kureyon before, and I knew that it was going to require a lot of planning to make it look like all those colourful stripes just casually threw themselves onto this cardigan! I find the red and turquoise portions of this colourway are what make it dynamic, but too much red and I felt that it would go from edgy/colourful to silly/clown. So I had to strategically plan where the red would fall. I chose to keep the fronts mainly in the greens to keep the sweater reasonable. Don't get me wrong... I love bright multicoloured Noro yarn! But I wanted to manage the level of brightness for this particular sweater to try and keep it wearable.
The resulting cardigan is perhaps a tad larger than I had planned, but still works really well for layering.
It feels like such an accomplishment to have knit an entire sweater in sock yarn! I'm in love with my sweater.