Tuesday, April 15, 2014

FO: Effervescence cardigan

This is the Effervescence cardigan, knitted with Araucania Ranco solid, a merino/nylon blend. I really like this yarn and I'm sad that it's been discontinued. I bought this pattern because I liked the front stitch design. The rest of it is a basic fitted cardigan, so I sized and shaped it to my liking. I made bracelet length sleeves and I think my shoulder section is a bit wider.

I converted this to knit as flat pieces, and I'm glad I did. The stitch pattern pulls in and narrows the gauge. After knitting about 3/4 of the first front piece, I discovered that it was just too narrow at the bust line. I re-knitted it about an inch wider. I normally like to knit the fronts of a cardigan wider than the back anyway, but this pattern needs even more extra width. If I had knitted in the round, I would have needed to re-do all or most of the cardigan in order to add in that extra width.

I knitted the front button bands using needles three sizes smaller in order to get a denser fabric. The gauge of the front button bands is 8 stitches/inch and the rest of the sweater is 6 stitches/inch. Here's my tip for the K1-P1 band: I knit the first and last stitches of the band as K2. That way, the edge knit stitches roll under a bit and you get a nice edge on the band.

1 comment:

Dayana Knits said...

I'm starting to really dislike the circular knit trend for just this reason... knitting isn't far from dressmaking, we need to be able to fit things well without ruining all of our work!