East Coast Girl Cardigan

9:13 AM


You can knit all you want in all colors of the rainbow, but, let's face it, the items that you use most are black cardigans. That's at least what happens with knitted garments in my case. On my quest for the perfect black cardi, I decided to go with a circular lace yoke cardigan by Veera Välimäki. This might be the first design by Veera Välimäki that I've knitted, and it was nice to see how she writes her patterns. Instructions were clear, and the design is pretty straight forward, so all there was to do was to knit it. So why did it take 9 months to do it?!


Pattern: East Coast Girl by Veera Välimäki
Yarn: Malabrigo Sock (322 g)
Needles: 3 and 3,5 mm (US 2 1/2 and 4)


The problem with this project was the yarn. I love Malabrigo Sock, so I thought that it would be an easy choice for this cardigan and bought the yarn. Now, a dark color, such as this BLACK, may bleed, but as it was the only color I was using I didn't want to waste time washing my yarn before knitting. The result: any amount of knitting resulted in my hands turning black, and the dye didn't even come off by washing hands so I would have black nails and fingers for a couple of days after knitting. Normally, I work on my projects while doing all kinds of other stuff: reading, travelling, sitting by the playground, waiting for something, you name it. With this project you couldn't do that, though, because picking it up always meant hand washing.


I don't give up easily, so when my LYS had a Malabrigo sale, I bought another cardigan's worth of Sock. This second lot feels different than the first one. It's much softer, and that makes me think (hope!) that maybe it was a problem with the dye lot and I won't have the same trouble with my next project. We'll see, I haven't tried knitting with the second lot yet.


I will have to make another black cardigan, though, as I like to wear mine open and this design doesn't work for that. The wide circular yoke means that if the cardigan is not buttoned it will fall off my shoulders (or maybe it's my shoulders, I don't know). You can see that in the picture above. Until my next black cardigan, I'll just have to learn to button up.


It's RUMS day.

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