Carnival Coat

Recipient: DD
Designer: Deb and Lynda Gemmell
Pattern: Carnival Coat
Source: Top Down for Toddlers: No-Sew Knitting
Completed: October 23, 2005
Colours: Medium powder blue tweed and heathered medium powder blue tweed/dusty pink
Yarn: Sirdar denim tweed acrylic/cotton/wool blend, sportweight
Pictures:

front

back (with a cute little hand in the background)


'in action'

2005-Oct-24

Yesterday my daughter asked to see "the monsters that aren't scary on the television". (Translation: our Monsters, Inc. DVD.) As we watched, I figured what the heck, DD is fairly well occupied, and I'm in the mood to do some clever fixing. So I brought out this project and fiddled around and created a third buttonhole. It looked great. Then I got DD to try the cardigan on to see how the whole thing fit. It's still too big on her, but the sleeves weren't ridiculously long on her anymore. I figured that by the time she grows into the body, the sleeves will also be more or less the right length, so I decided not to shorten them. And that means that this project is DONE! DD might fit into it by the spring. And if not, then next autumn. I'll post a pic when it happens. I'm looking forward to it - the cardigan looks so great with her colouring. Yay!

2005-Aug-22

I didn't actually work on this, but I did spend some time looking at it and trying to figure out how I was going to make a buttonhole in the middle of perfectly solid knitting without losing my mind. I came up with a plan.

I'm going to graft the replacement stitches, buttonhole included, where they're supposed to go, and then I will cut away the original sections of knitting and weave in the cut-away ends so the whole sweater doesn't unravel. I have not yet discovered a reason why this would not work, but the great part about the plan is that it doesn't require me to make the commitment of slicing away bits of the sweater right at the beginning. Grafting first will allow me to figure out the 'lie of the land', as it were, and if I screw up doing that, I won't have damaged anything irreparably. I think it will work. I will try to remember to take pictures before, during and after.

2005-Apr-8

You may recall that yesterday I brought this project and the buttons to work so I could sew the buttons on during my lunch break. I even had needles. But...did I bring the yarn to do the sewing with? Of course not. Buttons had to wait until the evening when I got home. They're now on! They look so good. They match the cardigan so perfectly. However, even though the buttons being on brought completion of the project just that much closer, I couldn't bring myself to do any of the fiddly fixes that have to come next. Later. Much later. When the back of my neck doesn't tense up just thinking about it.

2005-Apr-7

Behold, the buttons:

I took them and the cardigan to work today, so I should be able to sew on all three buttons on my lunch break.

2005-Apr-6

Yesterday's mail brought buttons from my MIL! Armed with the original buttons she had bought for the project, she went back to her LYS and successfully got another 2-pack exactly like them. So she mailed off both packs, thus sending me four buttons, right? Alas, no. One of the buttons broke in transit. :( At least, I have to believe it happened in-transit, since I don't think for a moment she would have sent me a button she knew was broken. That's the bad news. The good news is that I only need three buttons for the project, so it's okay. It means I have no extra buttons if one happens to get lost or (heaven help us) broken, but at least I can finish the darn project with what I have. MIL, on the other hand, is probably going to be very upset to hear of the demise of button #4. Take this story as a warning, kiddies - don't send buttons in the mail without protection. Bubble wrap would have worked, and the recipient gets the pleasure of popping the bubbles.

2005-Mar-28

I didn't get any more work done on this, but I did take the buttons over to my MIL's. I explained the button problem (pattern error - the materials list calls for two buttons, so my MIL bought me two buttons, but the pattern actually requires three). She said she'd get me another two-pack of the buttons, or, if the shop didn't have any more of those buttons, a whole new button set that would match. Isn't she nice? :)

2005-Mar-7

This cardigan is one big freakin' comedy of errors, I tell you. First I should mention that I completed the skirt and successfully attached it to the yoke. I then wove in all the ends. But the thing is in no way almost finished. There's a problem that I've been ignoring for some time which I now need to face. The pattern for this cardigan comes in four sizes. My MIL, when she gave me the pattern and the yarn, asked me to do the second-smallest size. Now, in the "materials" section, the pattern specifies that the two smallest sizes require two buttons and the two largest sizes require three buttons. Straightforward? Of course! It's no surprise, therefore, that my MIL bought two buttons, which are bee-yew-tiful and work gorgeously with the yarn. Well, guess what. When you actually get into the instructions of the pattern, it states quite clearly that the second-smallest size actually requires three buttons. Which I don't have. Moreover, the instructions do not tell you where to make the third buttonhole, and I wasn't paying attention when I got to that row and didn't make one. This would on the surface appear to be fortuitous - I have two buttons, I have two buttonholes. What's the problem? The problem is that the cardigan really, really needs a third button, as you will see from this photo:

The orange thing on the buttonhole band is a row marker where the third buttonhole should be. (The first buttonhole is hidden by the little foldover of the buttonhole band at the top.) So...I am now going to have to ask my MIL what the odds are of her buying a third button to match the other two, and I'm going to have to do some cutting-and-grafting wizardry to create buttonhole #3. And hey, did I mention that the sleeves are way too long and I need to do more cutting-and-grafting wizardry to scale them back at least an inch? I think I'm just going to take a deep breath and walk away from this project for the moment. It's too big for DD to wear now, anyway, so there's no rush. Bleagh.

2005-Mar-4

I have now reached the point on the skirt where I was when I ran out of yarn the first time around. And I still have yarn left. (It had better be enough. If not, I will start shooting people.) Five more rows until cast-off. I am so hoping to have finished all the knitting on this cardigan by the end of the day. (Sewing on the buttons will probably have to wait until tomorrow.)

2005-Mar-3

Skirt Mark II continues. I'm almost two-thirds done.

2005-Mar-2

This is what the skirt looked like before the Great Frog:

However, don't mourn too much. Skirt Mark II is rapidly catching up to its predecessor - I'm over a third done.

2005-Mar-1

Unwilling to let all the work I did on the skirt go quietly into the night, I took a picture before embarking upon The Great Frogging of 2005. (*Sob*) I'll try to post it tomorrow. I finished the frogging in the car this morning, then re-cast on (with 43 stitches instead of 50) and got 22 rows finished before getting off the subway. My goal is to do 60 rows every day - that way I can be finished the skirt after 5 days of work and then get this darn project off my plate.

2005-Feb-28

I am furious at myself. Let me explain. When I first cast on 37 stitches for the skirt as per the instructions, I looked at how wide that was and didn't think it would be big enough to balance out the rest of the cardigan (the skirt is worked perpendicular to the yoke, so the number of stitches you cast on affects the height of the skirt). I held the stitches up the cardigan and thought, yep, way too small. So I cast on another 6 stitches to match the next size up...still a bit small. So finally I cast on another 7 stitches for a total of 50, and it looked good, so I really got going on the skirt. Then, 106 rows into it, the first ball of pink/blue tweed ran out. "Hm," thought I, "I only have one ball of the pink/blue tweed left; I may run out of yarn before I finish." So I did the smart thing - instead of continuing to knit with blind faith that it would all work out, I figured out how many stitches I'd gotten out of the first ball to see if I had enough in the second ball to complete all 15,000 stitches in the skirt plus the extra 300 stitches needed for the graft to the yoke. Turns out I got about 8690 stitches in the first skein. So, 8690 stitches times two balls equals 17,380 stitches - yeah! More than enough for the 15,000 stitches in the skirt! So I kept going. Do you see my mistake? My bonehead, lost-my-mind, threw-the-logic-out-of-the-window mistake? I only figured out what I'd done wrong this morning. I shouldn't have doubled 8690, I should have added 8690 to the 5300 stitches I'd already done on the skirt to see if I had enough. Since 8690 + 5300 is 13,990, the answer was, of course, no. I ran out of yarn 550 stitches from completion of the cardigan last night while watching the Oscars. I am now going to have to rip out all 47,000 stitches of the skirt (*sob*) and do the whole damn thing over again with a slightly shorter skirt. I am so mad. And it is so my fault. Dumber. Than. Sand. Or, in the immortal words of Kirsty Alley, "I am too stupid to live." Sigh.

2005-Feb-25

The skirt gets ever longer. I refuse to take a picture, though - it's just a rectangle. Highly unexciting. At this point I'm over 40% done.

2005-Feb-24

I have begun the skirt portion of the cardigan. It is entirely uninteresting, but here it is anyway:

This may well be the only picture you see of the skirt on its own. I'm having trouble seeing the point of displaying an increasingly long rectangle. :)

2005-Feb-22

The entire top of the cardigan is now finished! I am all ready to start the "skirt" part, which is knitted separately from the rest of the cardigan and then somehow grafted (perpendicularly) onto the yoke. It looks like this:

I suspect the sleeves are too long, but I will worry about whether I need to fix that once the whole cardigan is finished and I get a better perspective on how the sleeves measure up.

2005-Feb-21

This is what the cardigan looked like before I left work this morning:

However, after monstrously bad traffic extended my morning commute by over an hour, the second sleeve grew by several inches.

2005-Feb-18

Sleeve #1 is almost finished - I've got about five rows left on the cuff, which is done in garter stitch with the pink-and-blue yarn.

2005-Feb-17

Raglan shaping is complete, and I now have a few inches done on sleeve #1. Unfortunately, in all the nice chatting with my mom this morning I forgot to start decreasing on the latest row, so at lunch I'll have to tink a bit and redo. My mistake is only 23 stitches back, not a big deal. Here's what it looked like this morning before I left the house:

2005-Feb-16

Got a bit of work done on this last night, but not enough to merit a photograph before I left home this morning. But by the time I got off the subway, I was only about 4 rows away from the end of the raglan shaping. So it's coming along nicely.

2005-Feb-15

I finally went into the pattern book and took note of what the cardigan pattern is actually called: "Carnival Coat". Yesterday I got a lot of work done on this. The collar is now finished and a fair bit of work has been done on the body:

I avoided folding the collar over for this photo so as not to obscure how much work I've done on the body. This pattern is pretty unexciting, but it does have a few good things going for it. Firstly, as I mentioned yesterday, it is interesting to be knitting from the top down. And secondly, the yarn really is lovely. It feels lovely and it looks lovely - I'm pretty jazzed on all the tweediness.

2005-Feb-14

Brought this to work today. I finished the collar and have started on the body. Doing a raglan sweater top-down is a bit interesting. Not immensely interesting, but still, better than a kick in the pants.

2005-Feb-2

No progress, just a photo:

2005-Jan-23

Well, I felt like doing something new, and DD has been growing out of a lot of her clothes lately, so I started this. So far I've only got about 2 inches of the garter stitch done on the collar (it's a top-down pattern).

2004-Dec-29

The final knitting gift from MIL - a book of children's patterns, and some Sirdar denim tweed yarn to make the cardigan on page 84. The main colour is a sort of medium powder blue, and the accent colour is a variegated blue/dusty pink. Plus two buttons (didn't get a good long look, but they seem to be mother-of-pearl, or at least good fakes). Unfortunately, the pattern doesn't seem too interesting, although it will probably be a quick knit, and the yarn feels nice. I'm probably going to put this one aside for a few months.