This project is a bit of a mash-up of 2 patterns. I’m recreating the look of the Eyelet Yoke Cardigan (sans eyelets), but I wasn’t able to get the required gauge with this yarn in a fabric I liked. I also preferred knitting a seamless top-down raglan rather than knitting the 2 fronts, back, and 2 sleeves in separate pieces from the bottom up, joining to knit the joke, and then seaming up the sides and sleeves.

So I determined what gauge I liked with the yarn (5 sts to an inch), took the metrics from the Eyelet Yoke Cardigan, determined the number of stitches needed, and then adjusted that to allow for the button bands to be picked up and knit (on the EYC they’re knit as part of the body, but that wasn’t going to work well with the striping I wanted to add). The # of sts required worked out to 65, but then I subtracted the 8 that would have been the button bands. The ICFR pattern gave me the placement for the stitch markers to do the raglan increases (the EYC decreases at a different rate).

I’m knitting this up with 3 of the yarns left over from my nephew’s log cabin blanket--the blue, blue-green, and tan (the yellow is being saved for another project). I’ll need all 3 to have enough yarn for a 6 mos size cardigan, which should be perfect for a late-July baby. I’ve got almost exactly 1/2 a skein left of each color, so I’ve decided that to keep the blue and blue-green from blending into each other, I’ll stripe with 4 rows of blue, 2 of tan, 4 of blue-green, 2 of tan, repeat.

4/11/10 - Changing my mind yet again…

I didn’t like the look of the narrow stripes, nor did I like the idea of the amount of work I’d have to do. Despite how narrow the stripes were going to be, I was still not going to be able to carry the yarn down the sides for the most part…which was going to mean a lot of ends to weave in. So instead, I’m going with much larger stripes (more color blocks). I’m also going with a kfb increase instead of M1L and M1R, which I really didn’t like the look of.

4/16/10 - More changes…I’d planned for a long-sleeved cardigan but it was clear before I finished the yoke that I wasn’t going to have enough yarn. So I’d planned for more of a vest, but once I split out the sleeves and added the seed stitch edging, it turned out to be more of a short sleeved cardigan. It’ll still be nice for the fall.

I ended up doing the yoke in (mostly) tan, with a narrow stripe of blue in the transition section between yoke and bottom, and then finished off the bottom with the green. I wasn’t able to make the blue section very wide, since the plan was for the edging and button bands to be in the blue. I was concerned enough about having enough yarn that I actually took a break from knitting the body to do the edging on the sleeves so I’d have a better idea of how much yarn I was using.

Now that I’m knitting the bottom edging, I’m not sure I’ll have enough of the blue to knit the button bands. I have 2 options: I can use the yellow that I’d combined with the tan, blue, and green for the Log Cabin blanket…but I really don’t want to add that color in here--I was looking for a more subdued look. I’m not going to buy another skein of blue just for 8 rows of seed stitch, but I do have another 5 skeins of the tan in a different dye lot. The pictures look quite a bit different, but that’s not accurate; in real life, the tans look pretty similar and the different stitch patterns will minimize the difference in colors. So I’m thinking that’s the way I’m going to go…

4/18/10 - I definitely didn’t have enough of the blue for the button bands, so I wound up one of the other skeins of tan for the bands. The dye lots are different, but I can’t see a color difference where the 2 tans touch each other, which is good. I opted to pick up approximately 2 stitches every 3 rows, which as worked out to be a good size. That worked out to 55 sts. Buttonholes were placed in the 3rd row of the button band, at 3, 15, 28, 41, and 53 sts.

The final touch was the buttons. I had a two sets of buttons from As Cute As a Button that looked like good options: footballs and baseballs. Both fit the buttonholes, but after consulting with husband Steve, we agreed on the footballs. The dark red-brown actually looked really good with the tan, navy blue, and dark blue-green.