My Sweet Chickadee

Facts you probably already know about me - I like red, garments with birds on them and anything that raises my core temperature above the freezing mark.

Fact you may not know - My favorite thing to knit is cardigans with colorworked yokes. A close second is cardigans that have decorative stitch patterns in their yokes instead of colorwork. Yokes, yokes, yokes! God I could go for some eggs right now.

Anyway, I'm all for trying new things, learning new techniques and knitting some crazy pattern just because you have a girl crush on the model.  But after you do all those things it's also OK to say, "You know, all I really want is a million yoked sweaters." Then proceed to knit the same sort of project over and over again. There's my knitting evolution in a nutshell.

When planning a little knitting for the Fall Essentials Sew-a-long it seemed smart to knit what I'd actually wear and use materials from the stash. My yarn stash isn't as big as the fabric stash, but that's not the same thing as saying "I have a small yarn stash". Oh no, pack ratting crafting supplies runs deep in my family. My grandmother build an extra garage/shed/purchased school buses to store all of hers. (That sounds like a joke but is 100% true.)

Back in my working days I amassed a healthy yarn stash, a bit heavy on the sock yarn side but still pretty good.  It hasn't depleted much since I started stepping out on it with the sewing machine. Sexy, sexy sewing machine......Oh sorry, drifted off for a minute. Annnnnyway, I popped the top off of the sweater part of the yarn stash and dug around to see what caught my fancy.  Why hello there bright red Filatura Di Crosa Zara, wanna be my main sweater squeeze this Fall?

Pattern is "Chickadee" from Ysolda Teague.  It's part of the "Little Red in the City" book which I purchased when it first came out and the proceed to knit NOTHING from it. Honestly I have a horrible reputation when it come to knitting pattern from books.  Is it the whole,"hard to transport compared a PDF" thing or that I just secretly like hoarding books?  Probably a little of both.

Back to the sweater.....there are plenty of DK weight odd balls laying around in a drawer, so I utilized those to do the yoke. Quick yarn break down for those that might be interested.  I think certain retailers were having a biggest yarn name contest.
White - "Biggian Design First Cross Merino DK."
Blue -  "Sublime Yarns Extra Fine Merino DK"  Color name "Plume"
Black - "Filatura Di Crosa Zara" (I think) could be a sublime yarn too. Who the heck knows at this point since I'm the worst at storing odd balls.

Unlike most of my yoke sweaters, this one was constructed top down. My brain was a bit cranky about knitting a chart "upside down" so to speak.  But I bribed it with some cookies and got the old girl working again. The chart is nice and easy to knit, very few areas where you need to trap the float on the back. The majority of the rows have only 2 colors, so you can put one in each hand and get a nice rhythm going.  After the chart is done the rest of the sweater is "TV knitting."  My shows of choice for this project were "Justified" and "Mr. Selfridge."  I bet Piven would love to play a gunslinger. "Nailing it!" - (Up Yours Downstairs Podcast reference. If you're not listening to their Mr. Selfridge recaps then do it this instant!)

I knit a size 38 because my bust measurement was between sizes and my gauge was coming out a bit small. The cardigan is knit as instructed other than reducing the amount of St St between the waist increases/decreases and adding an extra waist increase. The booty, aka extra cookie storage, always needs more increases. The only thing I would go back and change would be to make the buttonholes smaller than 5 stitches.  In my stretchy yarn they came out large and I had to go buy enormous buttons to match them.

Enormous buttons or not I've been wearing this sweater everyday. Anyone else do that once they finish a big project? It's like my brain thinks,"Now I can finally be warm. You'll never rip this cardigan from my back. NEVER!!!" *Clutches cardigan to throat and laughs manically*

In closing I'll leave you with this ridiculous outtake. Mother nature felt I needed a wind machine to spice up my blog pics. Woooooo KNITTING!