Squeeeee! Cardigan Accomplished!

Do you ever finish knitting something, step back, and think to yourself, did I seriously just make this? I am crazy in love with this Tangled Yoke Cardigan from Interweave Knit's Fall 2007 issue, and if it wasn't still oddly warm here, I'd be sleeping in it.

Since I'm a shorty, knitting sweaters for myself involves a lot of math because I can never knit the patterns as written. Even more calculations were needed because this was stash yarn, GGH Wollywasch, with a different weight than the Rowan Felted Tweed specified in the pattern. I had about a page of calculations, and even though I knew my math was sound (math is awesome!), I still was second guessing myself as I plugged away.

Knitting sweaters is like baking. In baking, I make tweaks all the time before I throw the concoction into the oven, and I never know if my changes are good or not until my finished product is cooled down and ready to eat. For sweaters, I am holding my breath until I can try on my garment after blocking. Relief washed over me when I wore the sweater and was able to fasten all the buttons - my main concern was that I designed too much negative ease in the waist shaping, but I was aggressive in my shaping because past sweaters had been too baggy around my middle.

Speaking of buttons, I was able to use the vintage buttons from my grandmother's stash! My aunts and mom gave me some of grandma's knitting notions and yarn stash since they thought she'd want me to have them. Unfortunately, all the yarn had icky poopy carpet beetles in them, resulting in me vacuuming the house about 10 times that day. Luckily, the buttons were immune to the icky poopy carpet beetles, and the buttons are fabulous, so I was waiting for the right project to come along to honor her memory. I'm so happy I got to use them.

Project details are on my Ravelry project page (rav link).