The Harvard Square cardigan is officially finished, a relatively quick and easy project that would have gone much faster if I hadn’t ripped out one of the sleeves to try knitting it in the round. I came up with the idea after having trouble sewing the seams under the sleeve with one color. No matter which color I used, a bit of it would peek through a contrasting stripe. Anyways, after knitting a few stripes in the round,  I quickly found out that these small garter stitch stripes are just not possible to do that way. It’s hard to explain why but just take my word, it doesn’t work. OK, it’s not totally impossible; I suppose I could have used one of PGR’s intarsia-in-the-round techniques, but didn’t have enough time to try one of them.

Yahoo! All of my hand spinning for the Spin-Off sweater is finished. Knitting should start this week, once I’ve rewashed the dark colors so that they don’t bleed on the lighter ones.

This is all that I’ve managed to knit during the past.  It only took a few hours to complete this sleeve, so the rest shouldn’t take too long. It’s really a simple pattern.

I carried the yarns for each color up the left side of the piece. By doing this, I won’t have to go back later and weave in a bunch of ends. Whenever I got to a larger stripe (yellow or orange), I tried strategically tuck in the unused yarns by wrapping the current yarn around them before I would start a row.  Click on the photo for a closer view.

It’s baby time.

I know of three that are due next month so, it’s time to start working on a baby shower gift that needs to be done withing the next few weeks.

The project will be the Harvard Square Cardigan from Knitting for Baby. The designer, Kristin Nicholas has a picture of it on her website.

The one in the book was done in Wollywasch but I had no luck in finding it in the specified colors.  In fact, I had a hard time finding  a good online source.

At first, Debbie Bliss DK merino seemed like a good substitue but unfortunately her green is just too dark.

While searching for a better green, I came across Dalegarn Falk. It has all the right colors, just a little brighter than I was initially hoping to find. Since the  sweater is for a baby,  I think it should be ok.

I was toying with the idea of using a lighter green, hence the odd ball of Schachenmayer Nomotta Extra under the Falk.  After getting a quick opinion from my husband, the darker green won out.