Three New Sweaters in the Works

I've never grown Amaryllis before, but since we grow Resurrection Lilies, which are really a kind of amaryllis, I think, I decided to give it a try.  Here they are, blooming away by the birdbath.  I don't know if they will live through next winter, but this is an experiment.

There are three sweaters in various degrees of completion at the moment.

These two cardigans will be jackets like my pink one.  The emerald green one has the same garter/eyelet borders, but the navy blue one has plain garter borders.

This cardigan is just for fun, to try out a variegated yarn.  This colorway looks pretty layered over an aqua tank I have which tones down the flashy nature of the yarn.

This is what happens when you produce sweaters so quickly -  you end up with several to sew together and do all the finishing.  We'll see how fast I am able to get them done.  The variegated cardigan is the latest draft of my raglan sweater with a few extra stitches added to the sleeve top.  It seems to fit nicely but you can't really tell until after the first washing.

The leftovers afghan is stalled at the moment though, and the gray and gold sweater is still waiting for its buttons.

Variegated Yarn

After I used up my red/yellow/orange variegated yarn (leftover from an afghan) to make the Flashy Cardigan to wear to Stitches, I was pleased at how well the raglan sweater draft fit.  During a recent  sale at the fabric store, some more variegated yarn was purchased, mainly because there was aqua in the colorway.  I could visualize a cardigan over an aqua tank worn with my tan trousers.  The color repeat is larger in this new yarn, so I was interested to see how the color sections would pool or stripe. The Flashy Cardigan yarn had very short color sections.  Who knows, maybe these fun yarns will come back into fashion!  I doubt it, but who cares?

The Flashy Cardigan

The only thing I wanted to change on my raglan pattern was the top of the sleeve.  There's supposed to be about an inch of stitches left that become part of the neckline, but because the gauge is only 4+ stitches/inch, the seam allowances used up about half of that, so I wanted to add a few more stitches.  Here's how my patterns look when I'm ready to use them:

 All the numbers with circles around them are row count numbers to tell me when to make increases or decreases.  This is one feature of a knitting machine that is great, but you can get the same effect with hand knitting by putting a safety pin every 20 rows or so.  That way you can get the row count in a few seconds instead of having to count every row, every time.

The ribbings are knitted ahead of time by hand and are hung on the machine instead of a cast-on.  This gives a more hand-knit look to the garment, and besides, I get to use the cast on that my grandmother taught me.  This picture shows the sleeve ribs waiting in their bowl.

 

 

 

So far I've finished the back and front:

Look at the funny pooling on the upper back!  You can never tell ahead of time what will develop.  As usual, I am wondering if there is enough yarn, since I only have one and a half skeins left, but time will tell.  It's not as if a dye lot difference will be noticeable.