I’ve put the Eris cardigan in timeout. I took advantage of our long road trip last week to get both sleeves knit again and finished the body yesterday. There’s still a noticeable color line on the bottom third of the body which I could probably live with, but I’m having issues with the hem that goes around the body and sleeves.
This Mountain Colors yarn is soft and lovely to knit with, but the hem doesn’t lay flat, even when I go down to a size 2 needle. And the last thing I need is an inch-and-a-half wide horizontal strip accenting this backside. I’ve done a little Raveling (like Googling, only on Ravelry) and one knitter used applied I-cord instead of the 12-stitch hem on both the sleeves and body. I like this idea but need to decide if I want to/can keep the corner cable treatment or if I should knit the sweater straight down and be done with it. Keeping the cabling would require me to do a lot of fudging and since I’m sort of mentally finished with this project, that doesn’t sound attractive. I can’t wrap my brain around all these issues before my trip this week, so I’m avoiding looking at it entirely and I’ve started something new.
Museum Sweater
Namely, the Museum Sweater from Little Badger Knitwear. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m enjoying knitting with denim yarn. I usually dislike cotton yarns, but this is a pleasure. It glides easily on the Addi needles and while it’s a little splitty, I can live with it.
Of course I can’t leave well enough alone and decided to modify the pattern. I changed the border to an overlapping garter stitch welt with a Channel Island cast-on, both courtesy of Beth Brown-Reinsel’s Knitting Ganseys book. Then, instead of doing the body in pieces I decided to knit it in the round with a purl stitch on each side for ’seams’. This avoids 10 inches of knit-and-purl stockinette in favor of 10 inches of knit-every-round stockinette. I’ll worry about dividing the body for sleeves and neckline when I get there. And I plan to do the sleeves in the round instead of back and forth. The less seaming I need to do the happier I always am. Definitely seat of the pants knitting these days but I figure patterns are only suggestions anyway.
This is making me much happier than trying to figure out I-cord vs. hem on Eris.
