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

I knit one of these before with a halo-y yarn, so I want to try it with a smooth yarn, KnitPicks Shine Worsted.  It’s an affordable yarn, so even at 10 balls, I’m only paying $25 for an entire cardigans worth of yarn.  I’m trying to decide between Serenade and French Blue at the moment.

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

Isn’t she adorable!? I love her designs, so I’m going to be super excited to knit this up. It’ll probably be one I wear a lot, so I want to knit it up in a gray, either Marble or Cobblestone Heather in KnitPicks Swish Worsted.

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?