Pattern: The design is Ysolda’s, some of the maths is my own.
Size: 38″ bust.
Yarn: Elle Elite DK (50% cotton, 50% wool), 6 balls.
Needles: Addi Lace 3.75mm.
Tension: 22 sts and 30 rows to 4″x4″.
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
Posted in August 2008 …
Preparations
Leaving parties are a bittersweet thing, but nothing takes the sting out like a preparatory night of novelty baking and vodka with a very good friend:
(Safety note: don’t crack on the vodka too hard until you’ve finished operating the oven.)
Overhearings
I am sitting on the front seat of the bus with oldest child next to me, my knitting on my lap; two teenage girls are sitting behind us. One of them talks about The Dark Knight, and how Heath Ledger died “because he was just, like, too good at being that clown guy” (the other one doesn’t talk very much at all). This is the second time someone has said this in my earshot on the bus. I wonder whether this exact conversation is being had word-for-word on every bus route in the world, twice, and have a bit of an existential “moment”. Their chatter suddenly drops to a whisper, and then returns to full volume with this:
Girl One: I know! Leila had a teach yourself to knit kit. Can you imagine? I know, I know… but it’s just Leila. Knitting. I think she made a pink handbag, with, like, buttons on it. I know! It took her, like, a year. She had all these fake fingernails and they broke. I had some too, and my mum said, “why do you want them? you’ve got perfectly good fingernails?” and they all fell off but I’ve still got one. It’s on my bedside table. It must be, like, well manky now.
Girl Two laughs.
Race For The Prize
The story of the little black cardigan, interpreted through space-hopper racing:
I started strong…
but tripped up at the shoulder seams…
recovered my knitting poise…
and strode to the finish!
Full modelled pics coming soon…
A Simple Plan
The seamless set-in sleeves on this cardigan were a worrying prospect when I first picked up the big square of ribbing and decided to complete its transformation to cardigan. I considered other, less numerically taxing, sleeve shapes – but the deep V on the original LBC is one of the reasons I clamoured to test knit it, and a raglan sleeve would detract from the long diagonal swoop of the neck, while a yoked sweater would simply slope right off me with such a stingy allowance of fabric up front. So, set-in sleeves it would be.
In the end, the calculations were not so strenuous. I used Sweater Design In Plain English as a guide to the shaping of the sleeve and the armhole, and – much as one would for a seamless raglan – worked decreases for each section along four shoulder “seams”. Unlike a raglan, the decreases were worked at different rates: the sleeve is shaped to an arm-hugging curve, the armhole to a steep torso-skimming slope. At the top of the sleeve, I cast off stitches as usual on a sleeve cap, and then picked up stitches along the cast-off edge and knitted in the fronts and back as I completed them.
One nice thing about this approach is that it makes it very easy to put the shoulder seam where I like it (just over the shoulder, towards the back) by knitting the fronts along the top of the sleeve. Once fronts and back have been worked to their finished length, all that’s left to do is join the right shoulder seam with a three-needle bind-off, cast off all neck stitches, and use a three-needle bind-off again for the left shoulder. Simple!
Right?
Oh :(
