Hetty Cardigan- A Blue Sweater for a Blue State

Happy post Thanksgiving weekend! Hope you all had a good one. I spent Thanksgiving day with friends, talking about how especially thankful we are (post-election) to have each other and to live in our little progressive bubble of the Pacific Northwest. I probably shouldn’t say “progressive bubble” and not say that we also talked about how we can’t be content to live in a bubble anymore and how it’s time for action. By saying that, it probably goes without saying that I voted for Hillary and the next day cried all day and started questioning everything. Like how almost half of the country could vote for a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic person like Trump and what that said about my (and my wonderful culturally and ethnically diverse neighbors’) place in this world. In fact, discussions about how we got here and what we do from here are dominating almost every conversation we have lately. It’s hard to talk about much else, so it warrants mentioning and truly deserves a longer, ongoing conversation. Since this is the first I have ever talked about politics on this blog, I’m honestly getting a little out of my comfort zone by doing it. So I’m going to keep this intro brief and move on to showing you the Hetty Cardigan I recently finished. Thanksgiving, politics, knitting… look, it’s blue!

Pattern

The pattern is the   Hetty Cardigan by Andi Satterlund. The lace pattern is similar to the lace on the border of the Miette Cardigan, but shaped a little differently and repeated throughout the sweater, so my Miette was good practice for it.

Yarn

The yarn I used was Malabrigo Rios. I fell in love with this yarn because of its soft texture, nice weight and rich variegated blue color. It was a dream to knit with as well. It did turn my needles blue though! 😉

Alterations

• Lengthened body by 2 more repeats of the chart.
• Increased 4 stitches every 4 rows for first repeat. Then 4 and 2 for the second repeat.
• Lengthened sleeve 17 rows.

Notes

In order for the lace pattern to be centered with the shoulder seam, when picking up the stitches at the armhole, you must have an even number of stitches on each side of the shoulder seam. It doesn’t say that in the instructions and that’s not the sort of thing that is intuitive for me yet, so the lace pattern on the first sleeve I knit is not centered. I almost ripped the whole sleeve out to fix it, but I had already had to rip that sleeve back several times for other mistakes, so I decided to move on. It really doesn’t bother me too much, but I wanted to point it out, so that others can learn from my mistake.

I ran out of yarn on first sleeve, due to lengthening. I had started this sweater so long ago, that I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to find one more skein that was close enough in color. Luckily, I found a skein in a different dye lot, that looked close enough at Seattle Yarn. So the 2nd sleeve is a different dye lot. Due the nature of the way this yarn variegates, you can hardly tell!

I like how, up close, the yarn overs and the Sl1-k2tog-psso make it look almost like little cables.

I used Lauren’s tutorial on stabilizing button bands again, but this time the grosgrain ribbon I bought was some sort of nylon blend and my automatic buttonholer would not work on it (it kept eating fabric), so I had to interface it. The iron temp needed for interfacing shrunk the grosgrain about 1/2 inch, which made it so I had to bunch the button bands up a bit to get it to fit right. You could also see the white interfacing through the buttonholes, so I went and bought a matching embroidery thread and hand sewed all the button holes open, so you couldn’t see it so much.

I’m so happy that I have gotten to the point where I can make alterations to patterns and understand that if I am going to lengthen a cropped sweater (to end at the hips and not at the waist) that I need to increase for the hips. My math seems to have worked, because the fit is good and this sweater can actually button at my hips. I’m glad I lengthened it too, because I have been wearing this a lot with jeans and over t-shirts, so the extra length was needed and made it more versatile.

I’m super happy with the buttons I picked out too. They color match perfectly. I was tempted to go for some crazier ones like the fun little mushroom or sunflower shaped buttons or blue stripes that they have at Seattle Yarn, but decided they would make it look too kid-like. I opted for more subtle, wearable-with-anything buttons and I’m glad I did.

This sweater is getting lots of wear and is not too warm, but is pilling already which I have heard Malabrigo yarn does. I have had a variety of the electric de-fuzzers over the years, but those never seem to work that well. Maybe I have just been buying the cheap ones though. I also have heard of sweater stones, but have never tried one. If anyone has any good suggestions for how to remove the fuzzies, I would love to hear it, but you don’t have to keep your comments to that. Feel free to comment on the sweater, politics, what you did for Thanksgiving and/or what you are thankful for. This could get interesting! 😉