This is my fish face, apparently.

Aha! I’ve finally gotten around to posting my finished Marion cardigan from the KAL hosted by Andi of Untangling Knots. The KAL ended on October 25th, but I’m mighty pleased to say I had this baby blocked and ready to wear about three or four days ahead of the deadline.

(And then didn’t get around to taking photos before going on vacation to Savannah and Charleston. Whoops!)

I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, the recommended yarn for this cardigan. As a knitting novice, I liked working with it and found the smaller skeins (110 yards) handy for carrying on the subway. Downside: more ends to weave in! It didn’t grow after blocking, not that I noticed anyway, and it feels soft.

Halfway through knitting this cardigan I worried the wool might feel scratchy against my skin, but it thankfully doesn’t. In these photos I’ve paired it with a black camisole and a wool bouclé pencil skirt I also recently finished. I’ll follow with a post on that one soon.

I usually wear cardigans unbuttoned so I’m modeling it that way first. If you’re familiar with Marion, you’ll notice that I lengthened the sleeves from 3/4 to full. I prefer the option of rolling up my sleeves a bit if I’m too warm (and this cardigan keeps me toasty, wow!). To lengthen the sleeves I just repeated rows (and decreases) until I got the length I wanted.

FBA, maybe? The hem angles up nearest the button bands, although this may be happening because my hands are behind my back…

All buttoned up. As part of the KAL, Andi wrote a post on how to do the math if your row gauge is off. I attempted to do this for about half an hour one evening, but was totally stumped! I’m guessing it’s not too difficult to recalculate your gauge (or something like that), but it just seemed way over my head at the time. Still does.

My gauge swatch came out two rows too long using US size 7 (4.5mm) needles, but the number of stitches was on target so I decided to stick with things as they were. Seemed to me that since this is knit top-down, the row gauge being off wouldn’t affect the armhole size too much. Everything below that…well, I’d find out. When I got to about where I wanted the cardigan to end I moved on to the ribbing.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve really been wanting to add more cropped cardigans to my wardrobe since I wear so many dresses and skirts. I feel like they’re most flattering when they end at my natural waist, especially since I’m rectangular, so that was my intention here.

I believe it worked, but there’s just one thing: should I consider doing an FBA using short rows in the future when I’m working on fitted patterns like this? The photo above shows diagonal lines from the side “seams” (Marion is seamless) to the bust. Also, even though the front and back are the same length, the front pulls up slightly. You can see that in the photo above this one. I’m not too worried this time around since I can always just wear it unbuttoned, but I’d like to figure out if that adjustment would help!

This is a size small. I knit an extra small for Myrna and didn’t have this issue so it might be how I approached this one.

I used Jeny’s surprisingly stretchy bind-off for the hem, which I’m really happy with. I didn’t do this with Myrna and, as a result, it doesn’t stretch as much as I’d like. I wish I had also used this bind-off technique for the sleeves because I’d like a little more give there.

For some reason, the cardigan has decided to change colors in these photos. The actual Jalapeño color can best be seen in the photos of me wearing the cardigan.

I bought these metal buttons from Mood (I seem to have a thing for buttons that look like this!). Also, I’m so excited to have tackled cables. They’re not too complicated, as it turns out.

Totally goofed up on reading the instructions for the sleeve hem! The instructions are written for knitting these flat, but because you’re knitting them in the round you have to make some adjustments. Here I thought, “Oh, you just have to ignore the purl rows.” Nope, don’t do that. Andi goes into that here. So, yeah, the cable above is what I came out with. Eh, it works. :)

And that’s all she wrote! Anything I missed mentioning?