Tempest

My Tempest sweater has made several appearances on the blog so far, but now it's finally getting the attention it deserves.

A couple weeks ago two months ago, Village Knitter received a huge Sanguine Gryphon shipment.  I love their colors so I decided to buy my first skeins of Bugga.  I have plenty of sock yarn and decided my yarn was destined to be a sweater.  I did a quick Ravelry search and chose Tempest (Rav link) from Knitty Spring 2008.

Lazy me decided I do NOT want to knit my sweater in pieces.  After gauge-ing and measuring, I worked the numbers and rewrote the pattern to be knit in one piece.  I also had to adjust the stripes because my row gauge was much different from the pattern though my stitch gauge was on par.

I was hesitant at the beginning of the sweater.  I was worried my stripes wouldn't "pop" enough because of the pooling in my CC.  If the green in it was clustered, some of my narrow stripes seem to disappear at parts.

Missing Stripes

The knitting was so easy.  The whole sweater is knit flat in stockinette stitch.  It was finished so quick!  I wove in all my ends like a good girl and blocked the body to make the next steps a little easier.

When it came to the sleeves, I didn't really think ahead about this one.  The pattern has the sleeves made flat from the cuff to the shoulder.  This was so not going to work for me.  I made too many adjustments already to just blindly follow the pattern as written here so I began to investigate.  As this is my first sweater, I really had no idea what to do though I was starting to invent ideas.

I've done short rows for so many projects that they seems to be the right choice.  After checking with some other knitters, they agreed and one suggested a Barbara Walker book.  But that would have involved a) buying a book and b) finding that book in a store and/or c) waiting for that book to ship.  No go for me. To Google I went!  I of course found an article on Knitty and some notes from a blog as well.  Between the two of these and many many attempts on my part, I eventually figured out how to do short row sleeves.  And they came out great!

In my first attempt, I actually did a short row in the way one does a short row heel.  How funny it was to put my cardi on and see a heel of a foot on my shoulder.  Rippit rippit rippit.  I was in such a rush to have my very first cardigan knit that I didn't pause to take pictures.  I even meant to take some to write a short row heel tutorial and forgot :o(  I guess that just means I need to knit another sweater and take LOTS of pictures of it along the way :o)

And the buttons!  Oh the buttons....sigh.  I walked into the shop one Wednesday and was so shocked to see new buttons had come!  And they were a perfect match.

I did it up right once the knitting was done.  After blocking, I sewed in a grosgrain ribbon button band and sewed backing buttons on with the fashion buttons.  Thank you Knitmore girls for your tutorials (grosgrain ribbon and couture buttons)!  Although I did know how to sew buttons already, I tried Gigi's suggestion of using a tapestry needle for spacing while sewing.  I didn't like it.  The needle was too slipper and kept sliding out.  I went back to the usual toothpick method since the wood has more grip.  Except we have the weirdest flat/squared toothpicks so it didn't give as much space as I was hoping for.  They came out fine though.

Now, after about a week of wearing my sweater, I noticed massive amounts of pilling on the right side.  Not on the left.  Just the right.  Thank you heavy organicy musliny cotton Brooklyn Industries purse.  I have to make a concious effort to switch shoulders every now and then.

I'm not so surprised though because I have a pair of socks made from String Theory Caper Sock that pill a lot too.  Both of Caper Sock and Bugga have a fair amount of cashmere and I've learned from listening to spinning podcasts that cashmere has a short staple length which I'm assuming would make it pill more.  When I pulled off some of the pills and played with them, rubbing between my fingers, they were very soft :o).  I think that proves my hypothesis*.

Other than the pilling, so far so great with this one!  I love it so much, I almost bought more Bugga to make another one!  Almost.  Until I thought of the 22+ miles of yarn in my stash (and still not done inventorying!).  But I do want to make another one a big modified (ideas:  ribbing on the bottom and ends of sleeves, add a hood, and do a tutorial for the sleeves).  That might have to be a present to myself after getting through some of my stash.  Guess I just have to knit more :o)


*As a teacher, I should know this.  But not having been in a regular classroom for a while, I couldn't remember the term.  I kept typing hypotenuse and knew it wasn't right.  Ugh #teacherfail