Mendocino cardigan

Recipient: DD
Designer: Alice Starmore
Pattern: Mendocino
Source: The Children's Collection
Completed: October 21, 2007
Colours: Originally white, now a green/sage combination
Yarn: Originally Zellers acrylic, worsted weight; now New Zealand wool, fingering weight combined with worsted weight
Completed status: I love it!
Pictures:

'in action'


front


back

2007-Nov-9

I now have pictures!

2007-Oct-27

On Monday, I finally got off my heinie while DD1 was at school and gave the thing a 45-minute soak in Eucalan. Then I blocked it, picking off as many bits of pumpkin patch dirt from DD1's field trip as possible. Therefore, I can now say that it is, at long last, officially finished! Hooray!

Photographs forthcoming - I don't think I have time to do them now because I'm trying to finish this entry before DD2 wakes up.

2007-May-3

Obviously I've been on a button-gathering expedition since my last blog entry, because I bought buttons for this project, too. They have been sewn on, and now all that remains is to block it. As much as I'd like to avoid this final step, it is definitely necessary, not only to flatten some of the seams and stop the bottom edges from curling up, but also because when DD1 tried it on, she complained that it felt itchy at the sleeve cuffs where the yarn touched her skin. (Well, actually she described it as "freckly", but I know she really meant "prickly".) So some Eucalan will be required to soften up the fibres a bit.

2007-Apr-30

This caused me quite a bit of panic, because as I was finishing up the back, it really started to look like I was going to run out of the yellow-green yarn. I did manage to find two more mostly-used-up skeins of it here and there about the house, and I had to cannibalize a swatch. To my extreme surprise and relief, it turned out that this gave me just enough (and when I say just enough, I really mean JUST enough...after I finished the buttonhole band, there was about a four-inch tail left and that was IT). I'm not sure now what the heck I'm going to use to knit a collar for my tabard in order to make the neckline of that less gaping (to avoid the Flashdance-show-your-brastrap thing that's going on with it), but I'll worry about that later.

ANYWAY, my point is that the thing is now almost completely finished:



And I love it! All that's left are the buttons...and probably also some minor blocking to stop the curling at the bottom and make some of the seams lie flatter.

The buttons are what are stymieing (sp?) me right now. I need seven of them, and I don't think there is a single kind of button in my button stash that I have seven of (except for buttons which are either totally unsuitable or already earmarked for another project). So I have to go out and buy some. I want wooden ones - I think that would go really well with the jacket.

DD1 also tried this on partway through the sewing-up, and it looks AMAZING on her. Just the right size, too - not too big, but still with lots of room to grow into over the year. This should be a big success.

2007-Apr-10

Once the novelty of doing ten inches in garter stitch on the baby romper project started to lose its appeal, I turned my attention to the fact that DD has pretty much outgrown all her will-keep-her-warm-on-the-cold-days-of-spring-and-autumn jackets and ponchos. (Well, except for the raincoat...but that's for rainy days, it doesn't count.) Clearly, she needed a new one. So I went pattern-diving and stash-diving and came up with Alice Starmore's "Mendocino" cardigan. For the yarn, I decided to dip into the ever-decreasing mound of New Zealand wool that I bought several years ago off of eBay. It's pretty coarse stuff, but this is outer wear. I decided to combine two colours for a little more depth and interest. The thicker strand is of a slightly yellowy green that I used for my herald's tabard and the Catherine Parr sweater I made one year for my MIL. It's a bit too yellowy to truly mesh with DD's summer colouring, so I paired it with a very thin strand (laceweight, really) of a kind of greyish/sagey colour. The result is more flattering on DD than just the green by itself, and I think the resulting knitted fabric looks more exciting, too:


I'm not sure exactly when I started this - sometime around last Thursday. So far I've got both fronts done:

and am now working my way up the back:

(apologies for the extra view of my foot - the thing curls like a sonofab*, I had to step on the bottom while taking the shot.)