What is the right number of cardigans?

Anyone?

Pretty soon I'm going to run out of storage space. But I may not be able to stop making them.

Wear it open

Wear it closed

This is the one I was planning in my last post. It goes pretty well with my new grey pants.

Machine knitting - it's fast. I started the actual knitting on February 27 and finished the garment today, March 4. It would have been finished even faster but I wet-blocked each piece and it took a while for them to dry.

The cardigan is exactly what I hoped it would be. Long with a cozy collar in this nice springy wool (Briggs & Little Sport).

The ribbing is really nice and springy - it's a kind of 2 x 2 ribbing that can't be done in hand knitting. Basically you fit two purl stitches in the space for one knit stitch on the front bed of a knitting machine, and two knit stitches in the space for one purl stitch on the back bed. There is no slack anywhere in this type of ribbing. I may use it exclusively from now on!

See those added stitches? Maybe not...

I was able to insert ribbing stitches in the middle of the fronts (at the point where the stockinette switches to ribbing) to widen the collar slightly, without changing its outer edge, as you can see in the photo to the left.

Collar seam - inside back neck

The back neck is hand sewn so I could figure out exactly where to seam the ribbing together. One nice thing about machine knitting is that it's super easy to knit a few extra rows more than you will need, and knit the piece off on waste yarn that protects the open stitches while you are blocking and handling the piece, and can be unravelled and tossed away later. Once I had sewn the neck seam to the CB point, I new exactly which rows of the ribbing I had to seam up. I joined them with a chain stitched seam made with a crochet hook through the corresponding stitches. It's less obvious than any other way to join this seam. And with steam, the ribbing pulled back in very nicely despite the seam.

More details can be found on my Ravelry project page.

And for you sewing enthusiasts, never fear. I haven't totally gone to the dark side. I'm going to up the pace of progress on my striped jacket of many colours next.