FO: Textured Cardi for fall

This is the textured cardigan by Rebecca Taylor in Vogue Knitting fall 2010. This is a fun cardi to wear. On the front, it wears just like a long shrug, and on the back, it feels like I'm wearing a stole. It's comfy and cozy without being overly warm. The yarn is Shepherd's Wool from Stonehenge Fiber Mill, which is really nice and soft and is not itchy to me.

This garment is just knitted as a rectangle and then cleverly seamed to create the sleeves. For the body, the only thing I did differently was to add 2 stitches on what would become the front edge. I knit them on the right side, and slipped the first stitch on the purl side. This creates a neater and tighter front edge.

I decided to just use the same yarn for the pockets instead of trying to find a matching fine-gauged yarn. Since the yarn is heavier, I only made the pockets 38 stitches wide and my cables are 6 stitches each instead of 10 so they aren't as dense.

For the bottom back ribbing, I had to sew a slanted seam that starts out about 1" wide and narrows down to one stitch. If I didn't do that, that bottom section pokes up and outward and looks like the rear end of a duck. I recently saw a ready-to-wear version of this sweater by Rebecca Taylor at Bloomingdale's. The stitch pattern is not the same and the pockets are bigger, but it's definitely the same cut and shape. For that sweater, the back bottom ribbing is knit with increases so that you get the same mitered effect with a normal seam. It's interesting that the knitting pattern does not reflect this.


I love the shape of this cardi-shrug enough that I'm going to try and a make a much shorter version of it. I'll find a simpler stitch pattern, and I will change the shaping a bit by using increases and decreases to create a V-shape for the bottom of the back -- that way the front sections won't have to pull up so much to joing the back and the back bottom will be relatively flat.