The green cardigan of 2014

I knit a sweater! It took forever. But it’s finished and I love it.

This is my version of the Mrs. Darcy cardigan. According to my ravelry project page, I started it on January 5, 2014. I sewed the final buttons on December 7, 2014.

 The post where I first described this sweater is here.

Everything went quickly at first. I finished the sleeves in January, but I stalled in February because I realized that I would need to modify this short, deep V neck cardigan to fit my long torso. I ended up using Wakenda’s modifications to the pattern. The funny thing is, her version looks very different from the original pattern—the V isn’t very deep. But I also added lots of extra length, so it actually ended up looking a lot like the original pattern!

Here is it without buttons. I essentially made an extra long size small, blended to a medium nearing the shoulders. It used a little under 5 skeins of Cascade 220.

This was my first time ever sewing buttons onto knitting. I used this video tutorial and it helped quite a bit. You really have to make sure you compensate for the thickness of the sweater when you sew them on, especially if you make a cardigan that fits as snugly as this one. You also have to remove the cat before sewing them on. Obviously.

Fun fact: since I’m a lefty knitter, the buttons are on the “wrong” side for a woman’s sweater! It’s knit in the round, you see. Yet another quirk of left-handed knitting.

More pictures:

from the front.

from the side.

from the back.

unbuttoned.

detail of the bust darts I added (it does seem to improve the shaping) and construction of the shoulder. I had never done a bottom up sweater, so wakenda’s description of joining sleeves was much appreciated.

I added an extra inch or so at the armpit when I seamed it together, mostly because when I started this sweater I did not have any muscle from climbing, but now I do, and those shoulders were gonna be tight (the forearms are a little snug, but that’s less of an issue).

It takes me forever to finish a big knitting project like this, but I’m always happy with the results. Here’s to tacking another sweater in 2015!