Knitting E-journal: Throwback Sweater

Welcome!  If you are looking for the Beeline Shawl, you can find it over on the gallery page.

Current Project:  Throwback Sweater designed by Andrea Mowry.  

I began knitting this a little over a month ago and set it aside after the fun of knitting the yoke was finished.  I'm picking it up now to finish it while I decide what the next project I'm going to cast on will be.

April 22 - We join this program already in progress.  I got distracted (squirreled if you will) by an interesting, and what turned out to be quite fun, shawl project a little over 3 weeks ago.  This kind of thing happens frequently to me.  I will be happily knitting along on whatever the project of the moment happens to be (in this case the gorgeous Throwback cardigan)  and then a friend will wave some bright and shiny new pattern that they just cast on in my face (as my friend Patrick did with the Beeline Shawl) and suddenly it's all I can think of.  I'm obsessed...that new pattern looks so much more ______ (fill in the blank here with your adjective of choice:  fun, interesting, lovely,...you get the idea).  So, I drop my old faithful project that up-to-now has made me quite happy and I cast on something bright, new, and shiny!  Confession time -- sometimes I go merrily on my way, casting on project after project without any real commitment to any of them.  In this case, I stuck with the bright, shiny, new project to the cast off, in part because it was so interesting and in part because Patrick was knitting it too and I didn't want the truth to come out that I'm really a fickle knitter and couldn't stick with it.  We each finished our shawl within a day of each other, Patrick feeling like he was a 'slow knitter' and me feeling like I could hardly keep up with him!!  The shawl was blocked a couple days ago and yesterday Mike (my husband and photographer) and I went for a short hike and took some photos of the shawl out in the sunlight.  You can find the pictures as well as a summary about knitting this project over in the gallery section of the website.  Our first official entry in the gallery!!!  Woo hoo!!

April 25 --  I am only a little above average in height, standing about 5'9" tall, but porportionally, I have quite short legs and a fairly long back.  So one of the lovely things about knitting a sweater is that I can make it longer if I want to...and I almost always want to.  A 'normal' sweater length is actually a 'cropped' sweater for me and a sweater designed to be cropped, well, that's more like a bra - it's really not a good look.  With that in mind, I decided to add 3 inches to the length of this sweater.  Yes, that sounds like a lot but I think it's about right based on some of my favorite sweaters and the worst thing that could happen is that I have to rip it back an inch.  It turns out that you can do a lot with 3 inches of sweater real estate!  I love playing around with elements of an original design to add my personal signature to a sweater.  For this Throwback cardigan, I riffed off of the yoke design to add the band shown here.  It reminds me of something that I might weave on the inkle loom.  All that's left of the sweater body is 2-3 inches of ribbing and then I'm cruising to sleeve island!