I have finally a cropped black cardi to show - my Secret Garden Cropped Cardi. This is the same yarn - Performance Cotton Gem in black, which I had purchased for the frogged Vogue cardi. My decisions for this cropped cardi were so many and so wrong most of the time that this small cardigan, which should have taken me a week or so of enjoyable knitting, took me more than a month and cost me so many troubles! First - it was the wrong choice of pattern, but that can happen. Then - it was the insufficient quantity of yarn. Instead of ordering all of the yarn online from the beginning, I bought the two balls available in the shop, then a week later - two more balls which the shop procured for me, with the promise to provide more if I needed later. In the end I knitted and unravelled a lot to match the balls of yarn from different batches, frogged and shortened the sleeves to make the yarn suffice (because the shop never delivered more of the yarn) and in the end I found the manufactures site and ordered the yarn I was missing online.
After browsing Ravelry and Pinterest for cropped cardies, I eventually decided to design it myself, using a stitch pattern from the Japanese knitting stitch bible I got as a present for Mother's day. I sampled several patterns and in the end I chose stitch 104. For the rib I continued down the cables, but for the button bands and the neck band after much deliberation and sampling I decided on a simple 2x2 ribbing.
And here's the little black cardi finally finished. I'm fairly pleased with it, though I would have preferred more interesting buttons and maybe only 4 buttons would have been enough. I did think long about the size and the placement of the buttons and 5 big buttons seemed OK, but today as I sewed them I was not completely satisfied with them. I'll leave it as it is for now and if Gaby doesn't like them at all, I might redo the bands next year. May be :)
The cardigan is for Gaby and I hope we'll be able to have a small photosession with it modeled when she returns from her two months' practice at Cambridge university next week. Until then - just these flat photos.
It's very cute. I'm so amazed at how you designed that all on your own. I supposed it being in parts helped with the stitch pattern?
ReplyDeleteThe arrangement of the stitch pattern is easy - you center it where you want it to be and include all the increases in the pattern as you knit. The real challenge is the number of stitches and rows and where and how much to increase and decrease.
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