Wooly Summer

I know it is currently 96 degrees outside, but I'm still excited about a giant pile of wool.  Particularly, my latest finished sweater.

Every October I go to SAFF in Asheville, NC.  The first few years I would go with friends as a day trip on a Saturday.  These days I make a girl's yarn weekend of it.  My big purchase of SAFF 2011 was two skeins of Yowza! from Miss Babs in the the "coventry" colorway.  I love that the massive yardage allows me to make a whole adult sweater with 1.6 skeins (929 yards) of yarn.  I have enough left over for a hat and some other small accessory.

Miss Bab's Yowza in "Coventry."  This colorway is actually kinda tricky to photograph accurately.

The pattern I chose to work with is the Acer Cardigan by Amy Christoffers.  I seriously love her style.  I keep finding patterns in new collections that catch my eye and it seems like they're always her designs.  A few of my favorite examples include Breckon, Pomme de pin, and Merryall.  Honestly, I have several more of her designs queued but I don't want to bore you with linkspam.

I cast on at SAFF and flew through the cardigan's body.  I had the entire body with button bands and collar finished in a week.  Then, I started the sleeves.  Those took me 8 months.  Why can't I commit to a sleeve?!?  Mostly I just fizzled out halfway through the first sleeve.  Then when I picked it up again I discovered that my sleeve caps were FAR too small to fit into the armscyes.  At this point I started researching what other knitters had done.  As it turns out the vast majority of knitters ignored the pattern and just picked up stitches from the armscye and shaped the sleeve cap with short row shaping.  Oh well, I already had the sleeve knit.  So, I reworked the math & designed a sleeve cap that fit (Go me!).  Next time I'll research what other knitters say about the sleeves before I start them.

I had one other factor that stalled me on this project.  I lost my buttons.  I purchased these lovely light grey ones back around January.  I remember putting them somewhere when I was tidying up my knitting before company visited, but they were never seen again.  So I went button shopping and actually found a perfect color match.  Imagine that?  I couldn't be more pleased.

This is actually the most color-accurate photo of the yarn yet.  Isn't it lovely?