FO Friday: Zest Cardigan

Front side

It’s finally, finally finished. I can’t believe it! It feels like I’ve been working on this cardigan forever. Ok, that’s not exactly true, but a lot has happened to me since I started the project on May 30, which is probably part of why it took so long 🙂

From the front, mostly unbuttoned

For the concrete details, this is the Zest Cardigan by Jennifer Thomas (Fern Knits). Jenn was gracious enough to gift this pattern in a contest, and I was lucky enough to win it! I immediately bought the requisite amount of yarn for the 38″ cardigan: 6 skeins of Knit Picks Palette in black. I ended up barely dipping into the 5th skein, but that could be because of my tight gauge. I don’t know 🙂

Back- over the shoulder!

As a yarn choice, Palette worked out OK. It is definitely a workhorse yarn (as the price suggests), but, occasionally, I would split the plies with my sharper needles as I was doing the lace or cables. And black was probably not the best color to choose, as it made it a lot harder to see.

Detail of the lace on the sleeve

There were a couple of different mods on the sweater. For the “purposeful” mods, I changed a couple of things. First, instead of doing seed stitch in between the front and back, I did a 1×1 ribbing. I was slightly afraid that going up to the 38″ would be too much for me, so that would pull it in a little. Turns out I didn’t need it! I changed a couple of other minor things, mainly shortening the sweater to make it fit my petite frame.

From the front, buttoned

Now for the not so on purpose mods. I didn’t realize until after I finished that I would probably like buttons running all the way down the front, and that there would probably be enough extra material (because I had gone up a size) to use the button band for this, instead of creating the loops called for in the pattern. I grabbed some cheap buttons from Hancock Fabric (and when I say cheap, I mean cheap) and tried my hand at afterthought buttons. I think they ended up OK, but I’m just slightly afraid that they will get bigger the more I wear the sweater. I guess we’ll see. Beyond that, the buttons aren’t exactly even (or placed well), so they gape. At this point, I would just rather wear it with only the top buttoned then do the math to fix this.

Detail of the cable on the back

The other accidental mod has to do with the cable detail on the back. I started this portion while on an airplane (only me), so I ended up totally messing up the chart. I didn’t figure it out until I had completely finished the cable and had done a couple of repeats of the lace. By that point, I was so tired of the cables (black fingering weight cables in airplane light? BAD IDEA) that I didn’t feel like frogging. It came out OK, I think. Besides, it’s not like I will see it very often.

Flat detail of the cables on the back

There’s not much more to talk about this sweater. I’m really excited to finally have a hand-knitted transitional sweater. I’m sure I’ll wear it a lot…as soon as the weather drops down from 89 degrees.

All folded up. C’mon, weather, don’t let it be this way for long!

For more FO Friday posts, check out Tami’s.