Currently viewing the tag: "february lady sweater"
I’m really excited about making 12 cardigans next year. I’ve been planning for a few months now, finalizing patterns and pairing them with yarns. I want to be open to changes throughout the year – I won’t stick with a certain cardigan if I don’t feel it anymore or if another one comes out that I like better. My goal is to have 12 cardigans at the end of the year that I absolutely adore and love wearing. (Pattern links are Ravelry links. All photographs from Flickr are copyright their respective owners and used for illustration and inspiration only.)
January – Liesl by Ysolda Teague
It’ll be a quick knit (judging from my previous attempt) and I think it’ll be just the thing to get me started with this project! I’ll need to put buttons all the way down the front, I think, just so it fits my body type better, but that’s okay because I like buttons. 
February – February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne
This is a crazy popular pattern, but I’d love to have my own. This will also require buttons down the full front (most likely). I want to use Malabrigo Rios in either Ravelry Red or Purple Mystery. I think if I use Purple Mystery for this (which would be fitting as it’s the February Lady Sweater, my birth month and amethyst is my birthstone), I would definitely use the French Blue for Liesl.
March – The Cooke Cardigan by Amy Herzog
I love the closure Amy uses here, so might try for something similar. I’ll probably end up wearing it open a lot too, which looks great.
I’ll write about the rest in 3 more installments. Don’t want to overwhelm you, or me, with writing about all 12 (plus some standby patterns) at once!
Have you knit up any of these patterns? What do you think of them?
I have 3 cardigans. All of which are store bought. As a knitter and crocheter I am somewhat ashamed to admit this. There are tons of beautiful patterns out there for cardigans and I haven’t made any.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did knit myself a cardigan when I first started knitting. It was the Must Have Cardigan from Hip to Knit by Judith Swartz.
Meh.
I used an inappropriate yarn – the sleeves turned out too long and the body too short. The collar is awkward. I have worn it a grand total of one time.
It was a great lesson in all those things you need to think about when knitting something though and how NOT to plan for a cardigan.
Unfinished Sleeves
I also have a half finished Cabled Cardigan from an issue of Vogue Knitting. I’m afraid to pick it up again because I stopped mid-sleeve and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to remember how to continue. I can always start over with the sleeves or move on to the fronts, of course. It’s a beautiful pattern and I love the drape of the yarn I chose.
I do really love the cables.
The color of the yarn is a little better than what it looks like in these pictures, but still not much. Evidently I’m a fan of purple cardigans, which I would not have said without having seen the proof!
There’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to finish this cardigan because I’m afraid it won’t fit right. I gained a lot of weight since I cast on for it in Spring 2007 and though I am starting to shed some of those extra pounds (woo!), I still worry. I don’t want to finish it and then be disappointed when it doesn’t fit right. I know there are ways to ensure a proper fit with knitwear, but since I’ve already done the back, I’m not sure I’d want to go through the hassle of adjusting the front. I might as well try, though, right? The worst that will happen is it won’t fit and I’ll have to find someone else to give it to and that’s not so bad. Not ideal, but not the end of the world.
As a result, my lonesome store-bought cardigans get too much use. I really need to have more cardigans in my wardrobe, preferably handmade, so I have decided to declare 2012 the Year of the Cardigan for me. I want to knit one cardigan a month for the entire year. I might get a headstart this year and knit up a few as well. The bummer about my office building during the summer is that it’s entirely too cold so even when it’s 90 degrees outside, it’s probably 55 or 60 at my desk, so it would be good to have more cardigans year-round. As I mentioned earlier, there are a ton of great cardigan patterns out there already, so the hard part will be choosing which ones to work on!
I’ve already bought the fiber to spin the yarn to make a Tappan Zee:
I don't have the tattoos, but I'd love to have that cardigan!
The fiber I chose to spin for the Tappan Zee. It's a beautiful color!
And of course, there’s the ever popular February Lady Sweater, which I would also really love to have. I would just need to obtain some yarn for it. It would be easy to pick this one to do in February.
![february lady sweater [365.256]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3027/2557274228_d668e752a6.jpg)
No wonder it's so popular!
Someday, I fully intend to have more handmade cardigans and sweaters than I have store-bought ones, and this will be a perfect project to get me there.
Do you have a favorite handmade cardigan that you’d recommend I knit or crochet? Please share!
Thank you for your Flattry!
