Cinnamon toast

I have this cardigan. It’s my favorite cardigan. There’s no good reason why it should be a favorite. It’s boxy and loose and cropped and it’s made of acrylic and I bought it in high school. It’s the dull mint color of hospital walls, and yet, somehow, it goes with everything and it’s comfortable and I love it. For years now I’ve been thinking I should knit a new version of my cardigan in nicer material than acrylic and in more colors than dull mint. What you see above is the result of getting off my tuchus and actually doing just that.

It currently lacks buttons, but that’s my new cardigan, modeled on my old cardigan, and I love it! It’s knit in Tosh Merino Light in Rosewood, a lovely brown with warm pinks peeking out every so often. I thought Rosewood would work as a neutral without being so neutral as to be dull. I think it does, at that. It did grow a bit more than I’d calculated, which was great for the sleeves, less so for the body. I had intended to make the sweater oversized, but it’s still a bit larger than intended, something I intend to correct with the next sweater. Because this is absolutely the first of several of these cardigans! Everyone needs a plain cardigan, I think. I may write up a pattern next time.

Oh, one more thing – I had trouble deciding how I wanted to knit the button bands, and in the end decided I wanted vertical bands. But I’d already knit the sweater and hadn’t incorporated vertical bands into the pattern. I don’t think my solution is perfect – it does create a little horizontal edge where it joins – but I made what I think of as afterthought bands. Knit vertically, they join to the sweater as you knit them, with the last stitch of the row being knit together with the edge stitch from the sweater on every right side row. It joins every to every other row on the sweater and I think makes for a really nice, sturdy band. Next time I’ll knit it straight into the sweater, but it’s a decent solution for the indecisive.