The Cardigan is out of time out...and finished!

I originally blogged about my frustration with this Nantucket Red sweater a few weeks ago and have now finally finished it, yea!  I went up in needle size to a US 6 and am much happier with the result.  To be honest it totally sucked to have to rip out almost an entire sweaters worth of knitting but the results make the effort worth it.  It went much better the second time around.  The fabric being knit actually has some give to it so I was hoping it would fit, if anything I thought it would probably be a little loose at the end of the day! 

It seemed to be going both slower and faster than the first time around.  Slower because since I had already done it once I was having a hard time working up the excitement to get working on it, faster because I had already done it and knew what I needed to do next.  Another change I made in addition to the needle size was to add in some extra stitches to accommodate my bust when working on the fronts since I am not a huge fan of the pulled tight across the chest look.  That is how the sweater is designed, but looking through the finished projects it looks just as nice not pulled quite so tight.  Although I did this it is still pulled a bit tight across the front but seems to look pretty good anyway.


The collar went much smoother the second time around, I managed to do a better job of picking up the correct amount of stitches this time.  I did make a change here again, I decided I didn't like the short rows on the collar as the pattern calls for, it was looking funny to me so I pulled out the bind off and redid part of the collar for a third time.  The collar looks much better now, I am actually really happy with it.  I was very apprehensive with the sleeves as I was deathly afraid of them being too snug, so I decided to cast on a few extra stitches, 4 to be exact.  The sleeves ended up being very close fitting but not uncomfortably so by adding in the extra stitches, I can't imagine how they would have fit without those extra stitches!

Mostly I am just so happy to be done at this point with a finished cardigan as a whole that fits okay since I did not want to have to knit this thing a third time!  If it still wasn't fitting right I probably would have shoved the whole mess into my yarn stash boxed and worked on something else.  I had started knitting this when Lil' Miss began the spring session of her ballet class and in the modeled pictures I am wearing it at her recital at the end of the class, about 9 weeks total from start to finish.  That is one heck of a long knit for me, I hope my next planned cardigan, Lilas by Hilary Smith Calis, goes much smoother.