Originally, I planned to have the Minimalist Cardigan done in mid-October after starting in early August. But a lot of things got in the way, so it took me until last Wednesday to finally finish the finishing. I was home alone while M and his sister were up skiing in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the peace and quiet were perfect for sweater finishing. It took 4 podcasts to get me through the finishing: 2 Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me<\/i>, 1 Cast-on<\/i>, and 1 Car Talk<\/i>. These photos are after two full days of wearing it.
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\nI had no idea how to seam invisibly moss stitch, and I had lost 15 pounds since starting this sweater. Therefore, I opted for backstitching to take it in a bit, especially in the shoulders where I knew it would be a little wide–a problem stemming from being pear-shaped. The backstitching appears to have worked fine. There are a couple of things I either don’t like about how this turned out, or I don’t understand why it turned out the way it did.<\/p>\n

First, I made the knit even portion of the sleeves 1.5 inches shorter than the pattern called for, and I still ended up with 7\/8- and not 3\/4-sleeves. Since my row gauge wasn’t off, and I don’t have horribly short arms, I don’t know why this happened. But you can see that these aren’t 3\/4-sleeves at all, even if I do have my t-shirt sleeve hanging out on one side. Therefore, without thinking about it, I keep pushing the sleeves up when I wear it, and now the sleeves are getting baggy (or is that because all<\/i> the sleeve increases were done in one row–the last row of ribbing). I wish I had knit the ribbing on smaller needles even though the pattern didn’t call for doing that. I didn’t pin out the ribbing while blocking, but to me it looks like I did.
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\nI’m wearing jeans that fit when I weighed 40 lbs more than I do now, and I didn’t wash my hair this morning, hence the cropped photo. Also, I could only find the 2 second delay on my camera and not the custom-set delay, so I didn’t have much time to pose. Sigh. But I couldn’t wait to get this post done and to get it marked finished on Ravelry. It just didn’t seem really<\/em> done until all that was completed.
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\nThe body length, although not as cropped as in the magazine photo, is fine with me, as I’m really not cool enough to wear cropped tops. I was aware that the body length wouldn’t be cropped, as I had measured other cardigans of mine, but I did knit the length given in the pattern. I’m 5′ 6″ tall, so I don’t know how tall the magazine model was for the sweater to look as short as it did, but she must be pretty darn tall.<\/p>\n

All in all, this was my third sweater and a definite improvement in both knitting quality, finishing and fit than my first two sweaters. So, even though it’s not perfect, I’m pretty pleased. I really enjoyed the moss stitch, and I like how it looks, especially juxtaposed with the stockinette. The bright navy color and the quality of the Cascade 220 are also big pluses in my book. I learned a lot with this sweater, including that cap-sleeves aren’t a big deal to seam properly, and I hope this new knowledge keeps my sweater making skills on the ascent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally, I planned to have the Minimalist Cardigan done in mid-October after starting in early August. But a lot of things got in the way, so it took me until last Wednesday to finally finish the finishing. I was home alone while M and his …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[16,24,27],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7pEGF-2d","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.molecularknitting.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}