A long time in the making, my Barton Cottage Shrug has been finished since just before our cruise and yet I haven’t found time to show it to you! I have this thing about sweater sized garments – I’m always afraid I’ll put all the work into knitting them, only to not be happy with the end result. My initial reaction to this one is “I love it”. I can hear you asking, “my initial reaction?”. Well. It looks awesome on my dress form, but on me I think it looks too small.

I’m contemplating sweater surgery to add 2-3 inches in length, though I haven’t wrapped my head around how to add that same length to the ribbon casing. I suppose I could also block the heck out of it as the first blocking I was careful not to stretch out the fabric. (Yeah, I’m going to try this. Throwing it in the sink now.)

Pattern: Barton Cottage Shrug by Kristi Schueler
Yarn: Knit Picks Shadow in colorway Spring Green Heather.
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm)
Notes: I knit the 34.75 inch size after reading comments that the sizing stated in the magazine ran large compared to how Kristi designed it to fit. Normally I would go with a size closer to 38 inches. I don’t think this was necessarily the wrong size for me to knit – the jury is still out until I try re-blocking it.

One of the things I always wonder about sweaters knit in lace weight yarn is ‘how much yarn do the really take?’ as the patterns always seem to use huge hanks of yarn and they don’t really tell you how much yarn was ACTUALLY used. My first skein of yarn (440 yards) made it from the cast on at the neck, all the way through 5.5 inches below the armpits. A second skein finished the whole sweater. I used 836 yards, 95 grams. Now if I add 3 inches I’ll probably be closer to 1000 yards.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2013 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.