Another One, Please!

I loved the first February Lady sweater so much that I made another. I mean, I wear it like twice a week, so I really needed another one! And you know that I've been trying now for a while to make a blue sweater and coming out with purple ones, so a blue February Lady was just what the doctor ordered.

This sweater I made from a cotton yarn, so it started out being soft straight from the beginning. I am hoping that I'll be able to wear it almost year-round. That's the nice thing about this sweater - you can either wear a light weight tank or a warm long sleeve shirt underneath which makes it a versatile sweater. The worsted weight Cotton Ease may be a bit heavy for our summer temperatures, but as soon as we dip below 100, I think it will be very comfy - maybe I'll be able to wear it 8+ months out of the year.

I loved the buttons that I had bought for the first sweater but they were expensive. When I was looking at buttons, I spent twice as much time looking for beautiful buttons that were fairly reasonable. I'm really happy with the ones that I picked. They were just $3.20 for 4 buttons (compared to $8 for 4 buttons for the first feb sweater). Well worth the 30 minutes of standing in the button isle walking back and forth looking at the same buttons over and over.

I love the white buttons against the blue sweater and that they look like little wedding bouquets.

I took some liberties with the pattern for this sweater. I may really like this pattern, but that doesn't mean that I want 6 identical sweaters in my closet. Well, maybe I do, but I do know that variety won't kill me.

I one thing that I did was exchange the garter stitched top with seed stitch. Personally, I love the way the seed stitch looks more than the garter stitch. As a result, I couldn't really do the eyelet increase row, so I just added more increase rows.

Second major change was to switch the gull lace pattern (7 stitch repeat) for a lace pattern that I found on Ravelry (but you can also find it here). I actually spent several weeks trying different lace patterns, looking for the pattern that I liked the best and this was my favorite by far. It is a well written pattern and it looked good in the swatch and better in the sweater!

The lace pattern is a multiple of 6+1, so there was math involved in figuring out how to change the pattern: how many stitches to cast on (no change), where to put the 'marked' stitches, and how many stitches need to be between the 'marked' stitches right before separating the sleeves from the back/front. I'll spare you the details and cut to the chase. I made the XS size again, casting on 83 stitches.

My setup row looked like: K16, mark next stitch, K10, mark next stitch, K28, mark next stitch, K10, mark next stitch, K15.

The last change to the yoke was that I repeated the increase row (rows 5&6) 21 times instead of just 18. That made up for skipping the eyelet increase row. Now, I still needed to add a few more stitches, but I added them evenly while knitting row 1 of the lace. So, after the first row of lace, the sections should have the following stitch counts: 40 (front), 54 (sleeve), 78 (back), 54 (sleeve), 41 (front), for a total of 267 stitches.

Now, here's how I kept myself on track with the lace pattern. I cut myself many little pieces of string and placed them between each repeating set of stitches. That way, I could catch and fix each mistake within the repeat (and I made and fixed mistakes all the way through the entire sweater). The most common mistake that I made: skipping the yarn over.

When I got to the sleeves, I thought that I had memorized the pattern by now and could fix anything (and fixing my mistakes was sooo easy) that I could go without my guide strings. That didn't last too long until I goofed up so much that I couldn't fix it (I couldn't even figure out what I had done) and had to live with the mistake (its underneath the arm and out of view) and just continue on, but only after I added back my guide strings.

I am very please with how this sweater turned out! I can't wait to wear it but I am saving it for my birthday party coming up (I'm turning old this year) so I'll just have to wait.

And what will I knit next? I know I'll have to (want to) branch out and try a different pattern soon. I've just had such a bad time with patterns this past year, having to reknit several times both the coachella and yosemite sweaters (and I still have to reknit coachella again). I've got several patterns that I'm considering right now and I just don't know what I want to do yet. In the meantime, I may do some Sudoku until I decide.

If your sister is in a tearing hurry to go out and cannot catch your eye, she's wearing your best sweater.
~ Pam Brown