Finishitis #2

Let us turn, for a moment, to knitting.  A while ago I showed you an incredibly light knitted summer top.  It's made with a single thread of lace-weight slubby cotton from ColourMart.  It's hardly there at all.  While it will be just the thing for those hazy hot days of summer when The Sewing Lawyer would really rather not be wearing anything at all, those days are few in this neck of the woods.  For more versatility, a matching cardigan is just the thing.  However, it took almost 2 months of knitting to produce a sleeveless top that weighs only 51 grams.  So for the cardigan, the lace weight cotton was doubled to produce a slubby and still very lightweight cardigan.

This is the Featherweight cardigan.  There are 5,405 projects using this pattern on Ravelry.  So, a very successful pattern for the designer.  Briefly, mine is top of the heap :-) as it's the most recently-posted.

Beginning of endless rounds

However, as usual the Sewing/Knitting Lawyer cannot leave well enough alone.  The cardigan is knit top down and seamless, starting with a bunch of stitches which are the back neck and about 6 on either side which turn into the sleeves and front.  Then you increase, and increase, and increase, at the raglan sleeve points (8 stitches every 2 rows) until you have enough to make sleeves and are down to your underarms, and then you knit, and knit, and knit, and knit on and on and on until you have a sweater body and sleeves.

Back neck unattractiveness - as
designed

And then, you pick up those front/collar bands and knit back and forth in endless rows of stockinette stitch until you are ready to slit your throat with the boredom, and then you have a sweater where if you don't haul down on the front bands (as the model is doing, I notice), the back neck sort of sticks out at the wide and sharply curved back neck in a most unattractive fashion, as shown at right.

This would never do!  Taking a cue from the weightless top, I made front bands using the same lace pattern as in the top (but 2x the heft with doubled yarn), and blocked these into long bands which I sewed to the body.  This allowed me to ease the fronts above bust level and to make the band hug the back of my neck.

Without further ado, some pictures of this object, finished today after only one month of knitting!  (I bow down to people who can toss off a project in a couple of days.  I cannot figure out how this is done without time travel.)

Neck-hugging band
of lace

The sleeves are slightly shorter than the pattern calls for - they hit at my elbow.  The length of the body is slightly longer than the pattern calls for - I wanted it to end at about the same spot as the matching top.

The band hugs the neck very satisfactorily.

 I did the equivalent of a 3 needle bind off at the neck CB (I had to knit 2 bands to ensure the arrows in the lace bands would be in the same direction).  However, I used a crochet hook to do the bind off.  This makes for some nice symmetry in the pattern.  Do pause and admire the neck-hugging properties of the lace band.

Here it is with matching top.

Sorry for the dress form photos.  It is really wet and cool here today.  If it warms up tomorrow, maybe I'll model these for the blog with the last of the Finishitis projects.  If you were keeping count you will know it is a sewing project.