buttons – knitbyahenshop

Last month, I finally finished the sweater I have been working on—just in time for Fall! Also, a near perfect color match for the yellow pear tomatoes in my garden. Always dress to match your produce, I say.

The pattern is Andi Satterlund‘s Miette, which is available as a free Ravelry download. It’s a cropped cardigan with 3/4 sleeves and eyelete edging along the button, neck, and wristbands. It looks really fantastic over dresses:

For once I used the recommended yarn for a pattern: Cascade Yarns Sierra (in the gold colorway, a cotton.wool blend, which is of course now discontinued. Right from the start, I made a major modification: I used the directions for the 42″ large to get a 34″ small with gauge of a little over 5 st per inch. I was nervous about this approach, but other ravelers made it work, and it was clearly the right call.

I made several other modifications so the cardigan would fit me better. 1) I cast on five stitches at the armholes for my shoulders. My last cardigan was a bit snug on my shoulders. I also did waist shaping at the sides instead of bust darts, with a decrease of sl1st, knit, knit, k2tog beneath each armpit every 4th row. I did bust darts on my first cardigan, but I have since realized I really didn’t need them. Finally, I added one repeat of rows 70-80 for length, because I have a long torso and I didn’t need this cardigan to be super cropped.

I was quite fortunate to find great buttons for this cardigan! They were 3/4” buttons instead of the recommended 5/8” but I wanted completely matching buttons, and these were the best ones. I used the same video tutorial to make sure they would be secure.

After all of this work, it felt like the blocking took forever! I guess the cotton/wool blend yarn is not as fast to dry as some other yarns.

I think this is my favorite sweater that I’ve made so far. And all though it took me a little over a year to finish, I got it done just in time for Autumn colors and cooler temperatures.

Here are more dorky photos of me wearing this great sweater:

I really like it.

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!

Tag: buttons

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