I've been making steady progress on my cashmere featherweight cardigan, knit in my Purple Label Cashmere sock yarn in colourways sand and shadow. I'm knitting it in wide, almost 3" stripes. I'm loving the way that the colours are working together. I opted to do a seed stitch hem and a seed stitch button band (although there are no buttons... is it still called a button band?) to avoid curling and hopefully add a little bit of structure to the edges of the fabric so they fall and drape nicely. It's a lot of stockinette stitch at a pretty fine gauge, I didn't know I had it in me to knit such a fine sweater, but after the success of my Wispy, I'm feeling like anything is possible! At this point, with the body done and only two sleeves left to knit, I'm worried that I've made the sweater too big for me... but I'm going to just plow through, hope that blocking magically makes it fit me exactly the way that I want it to, and if it doesn't... it'll become a show sample.
Next up, another little purple baby sweater (the first one was briefly blogged about here, still no buttons!) I came across this zigzag lace stitch pattern and fell in love. I knit this sweater from the top down. I used the lace stitch on all four raglan "seams" as well as on the front flanking the button band. To make this sweater a little more feminine (since it was already pretty feminine with the lace detail) I added picot hems to the bottom and the sleeves. I think I'll knit another sweater using the exact same template, but with a more boy appropriate cable in place of the lace and garter stitch hems in place of the picot edge. If all goes well and I can figure out how to go about sizing baby sweaters I'll write up the pattern for you all to try! This little grape-juicy number took about 75g of Purple Label Cashmere sock yarn (in grape of course) and by my estimation would fit a 0-3 month old baby. But don't hold me to that! I need to do a bit more research on the whole baby size thing, I'm told they come in many different shapes and sizes and I'm not sure that standards really exist...
And lastly for today, remember this luscious skein of merino-silk singles I showed you last week? Well, I told you I fell hard for that lacy zigzag cable stitch. I wanted a quick, straight forward project to test this sample skein of yarn that I had (it's a new base that I'm considering... thoughts?) and when I couldn't find a pattern that matched exactly what I had in mind I just improvised and came up with this! Very simple, very chic. The silk in the yarn really gives nice drape and shine! Any interest in this pattern? It's very simple, I'd be happy to share.