2 posts in one day? I think yes.

Well now that my fabulous update about Rachel's dress is out of the way, I read through some old posts and figured I was due for an update about my grey cardigan, so here goes.

I started this a loooong time ago, and was hoping to have it finished by fall 2010. Well, I found out I was pregnant in fall 2010, so I put this project aside since I knew it wouldn't fit/I wouldn't be wearing it for at least a year. In the meantime I worked on baby Reuben's afghan and Rachel's dress when my circulation would let me. Which reminds me, I never posted pics of Reuben's afghan. That will be next. Anyway. Once I finished Rachel's dress as far as knitting goes I pulled out my grey cardi again. And here's what happened.

First of all, this pattern is weird. I decided not to do the goofy vest insert thing, and decided to just do a straight stockinette stitch for both front panels. This gets complicated, though, because the vest insert thing is knitted separately AND sideways and then sewn on, so to change the pattern I had to do quite a bit of figuring. I tried out my re-worked pattern on the left front panel, and all seemed to go well, so I'm really excited. I then moved on to the right front panel and got about 8 inches up before noticing I had counted wrong on the waist shaping and had to almost start over. No biggie, it was only a few inches. But as I was unpicking it I realized that I should probably make sure the front shaping matches the back shaping. When I pulled out the back piece I finished about a year ago I realized a stupid thing I had done.

The pattern has you stockinette up about 10 inches and then switch to garter, so that's what I had done on the back. But when I changed the front to be straight stockinette all the way up I had forgotten this tidbit. Also when I worked the back I increased in a weird way that made it poof out, and was thinking of re-doing it anyway. So I spent the other day undoing a good 50 rows or so of my cardi back piece. :( I'm okay with it though, I can fix the poof problem at the same time as making a normal looking sweater.

So that's my update. I now have a front panel, about 1/4 of the other front panel, and I'm down to probably 1/6 of the back piece. I'm still planning on seeing how it looks as just a vest, so it might still be done by about Christmas if my kids let me knit every now and then.