Monday, March 24, 2014

Light Blue Pullover

This pullover still needs some blocking to stretch out the lace pattern and make the sleeve caps smooth, but at least it is finished.

The lace portion should flare out more since form fitting the midriff is not an attractive look at my age, but this yarn usually relaxes quite nicely after a few washes.

In spite of the three unassembled sweaters sitting in the sewing room, I am thinking of making a lot of baby sweaters for the long-planned stash of future shower gifts.  My girls are also at the stage of life when friends are having babies so it would be nice to use up the scrap yarn from all these sweaters in a useful way.  I found a really nice baby sweater pamphlet this week at the thrift store with some nice basic sweaters including a patterned round-yoke cardigan that would be good for using up leftovers. 

One New Sweater After Another

As a distraction from sewing together the sweaters recently loomed, there has been a lot of crocheting going on around here.  I found the purple Soft Serve sweater that has been about half completed for months and thought about working on it.  I just looked at an old post and discovered that I started crocheting that purple Soft Serve in the fall of 2012, so that poor UFO was older than I thought. In order to refresh my memory of the pattern I decided to use up the leftover yarn from the latest afghan, the mint green color, to make a fast bolero version.  There seemed to be most of a one-pound skein left and surely that would be enough to crochet a bolero-type sweater, right?  Not if you change your mind and crochet a regular cardigan, then have to go buy another skein of yarn, use that up and have to buy another, ending up with just as much leftover yarn as you started with.  Stash busting it was not.  And this sweater weighs over two pounds.


In spite of the weight, it is a very cozy and comfortable cardigan and will be great for the cold winter mornings.  I used backwards crochet to finish off the border edges.

Even though it took longer than I thought it would, this did make me work on the purple version, and I managed to finish that off this morning but haven't taken any pictures of it yet.  The purple version has ties instead of buttons.

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Sweaters in March

There is a burst of knitting activity going on this month so far.  It's a lot faster to whip up a pullover than a cardigan.  Now all the assembly of the pieces has to happen.
 The picture above shows the pieces of the new pullovers.  The picture below shows a better representation of the true colors of the purple and the pink sweaters.
The pink sweater has a round neckline and all the rest will be V-neck pullovers.  There is also a yellow cardigan that needs its buttons.

These should look a lot better than  my old frayed sweatshirts for working around the house.

Update:  My sister was down for a visit and to go with us to Stitches West, so I had her try on the round-yoke cardigan.  It looked so much better on her than on me that it was soon on its way with its new owner.  I learned a lot making it but it just wasn't comfortable on me.