Swing Swing Swing

If you’re looking for the Wollmeise giveway, it’s on the post below. The contest runs through until 12am Eastern time, so you still have 3.5 hours to enter! 🙂

I am so excited to finally be able to post a finished picture for my Swing Jacket – now a Swing Cardigan – that I first posted about back in January and then tested my signature circulars on when they arrived in February. I had gotten every bit of the body done – with the exception of the button bands – by the time the Ravelympics came around, so I knew that if I just picked it up again I could finish it right away. Even knowing that, however, I still took my own sweet time getting back to it and it wasn’t until April 4 that I finally started working on it again. And then of course I kicked myself for not finishing it earlier as I just LOVE the end result!

I had to do a heck of a lot of modifications to the pattern as I was feeling stupid adventurous and decided to use a DK weight yarn (this is a worsted weight pattern) because I just LOVE Madelinetosh yarns and her DK line is amazing. So not only was my stitch gauge off, so was my row gauge. This wasn’t so bad in the beginning with the miles and miles of rib – which turns out to be rather beautiful and flattering on the body – but once I hit the yoke? That was much much harder to deal with!

All those gorgeous cables, which is what made me fall in love with the pattern in the first place, all of a sudden created a huge problem! After a ton of math – that I had to correct and re-correct about a million times – I was able to add a cable here, some rows there, a decrease there, and ta-da! It all worked out in the end. And the fit? Just perfect! 😀

After doing one of the button bands, I had to decide on button placement. I found out that I didn’t want the buttons to stop halfway like in the pattern, as I like to close my sweaters all the way, so I went ahead and put six buttons in all the way down with 4 inches between them. Big mistake!!! As it turns out there is a very good reason as to why the pattern had six buttons so close to one another at the top! The all-rib sweater when worn correctly should be a little stretched which means that if you don’t have buttons close to one another the areas between the buttons tries to contract back (duh! right?) creating huge, gaping, ugly holes! I was SO upset about this as I already had the button band finished and sewn on and the buttonholes were already done! Plus, I didn’t have another six buttons! So I started asking around Ravelry and one of my awesome friends there (Kristi! – 53Chevy on Rav) suggested using an afterthought buttonhole as described in this blog post. It required cutting the stitch, but since I’d already steeked before, I figured it shouldn’t be as big of deal. And you know what? It really wasn’t! Other than the millions of ends I had to weave in, doing the afterthought buttonholes was actually one of the easiest parts of this sweater! I also had to spend some time searching for the perfect buttons since I now needed more of them and I totally think I found them!

Aren’t the buttons gorgeous? They are from Beadfreaky and as it turned out she had just the right number for me to make the sweater. I swear it was fate calling me! So although it seems like this sweater took me forever, it really didn’t – I’m just a lazy person with button issues, LOL! But still a lazy person with button issues that has a big smile on her face! 😀

Pattern – Swing by Mel Clark (rav link | project link)
Yarn – Madelinetosh Tosh DK (rav link | store I used)
Needle – US6 (4mm) and US7 (4.5mm)
Cast on – January 23, 2010
Cast off – April 12, 2010
Modifications – Changed stitch/row count for different gauge and different weight yarn. More exact numbers in my pattern page. Placed more buttons than called for in pattern, used afterthought buttonhole.