World’s fastest cardigan

I cranked out a cardigan last week. Yes, week. Yes, you heard me. Week.

I have great aspirations and dreams about being a garment knitter. Turning out Norwegian ski sweaters, cardigans from my growing collection of vintage patterns, lightweight summery tops, having a whole closet full of wooly handknits. However in my dreams, I am apparently a much more patient knitter with a much long attention span than real life. In real life, there have been plenty of false starts. Yarn bought, patterns started, projects ditched.

But I’ve officially conquered my first real garment.

I way daydreaming about knitting recently, and decided that a bulky weight sweater would be a good starting point to cut my teeth on garment knitting. I decided I wanted to knit it in Lamb’s Pride Bulky. Great colors and I love the halo from the 15% mohair content. I had a weight, I had a yarn. I plugged cardigans + bulky into Ravelry’s advanced search. And what was the first result? A cardigan in Lamb’s Pride Bulky, in colors I like and wear frequently, and in a book I own, Stitch n’ Bitch Nation. Cardigan kismet?

Why yes, I do believe so!

I ordered the yarn from Kaleidoscope Yarns, and Mel bought me the beautiful cranberry colored glass (shell?) buttons from my new favorite local yarn shop, Loopy. I made almost no alterations to the pattern, except one. The pattern called for garter stitch around the neck, bottom edge and cuffs. Not only am I not a really big fan of garter stitch as an edging, in my personal experience it wants to flip up and just generally look kind of funky. So I omitted the fair isle chart for the sleeves and instead did all the edging in 2x2 ribbing on slightly smaller needles. I’m really glad I did that because I think it looks grand.

It’s warm, it’s cozy, it’s soft, hell, it even looks good from the inside.

And remember that week thing? I started it on Monday, February 16th and was wearing it Saturday night February 21st when we went out with friends. This literally flew off my needles. At 3 stitches an inch, I guess that’ll happen.

But don’t think this was easy going the entire way. I had my first sleeve finished and was starting the second when I did a little calculation. Almost one skein of black per sleeve, up to the point where it connected with the body. Yes, that would be two skeins for two sleeves.

Out of a total of five.

As I started the body, I didn’t think I could possibly eek out the entire body, yoke and button bands with the three remaining skeins of black. I contemplated calling up Kaleidoscope and seeing if they had another skein in my dye lot. I had only just purchased the yarn, so I thought the odds were fairly good they’d have one. I usually over buy rather than under buy for a project, so I’m not sure why I took five skeins of black at face value, especially considering I was adding ribbing, which eats up more yarn. Nevertheless, I threw caution to the wind and proceeded on.

Since I didn’t start this entry off cursing about how I ran out of yarn, suffice it to say I didn’t.

But want to know how much black I did have left?

I won’t expect that luck next time. Enough said.