Winter 2009/2010 Issue
I know that we are getting on towards summer, and that very soon I will (like all Chicagoans) start complaining about the heat and the cost of AC, but when I found the Karen Garlinghouse vest on page 54, I had to knit it. (And let’s face it; the weather has been chilly lately, so a chic, business-casual vest is perfect for the weather!) While knitting textural elements like cables is time-consuming when there are a million cables in every other row, I adore how cables look (which explains why most of my sweaters feature cables).
I pulled 5 skeins of Patons Shetland Chunky Tweed in blue from my stash, which is technically 1 skein short of the yardage called for in the pattern ( a fact I chose to ignore while obsessively checking that Patons was still making their Shetland Chunky Tweeds; they are). I shortened the vest’s length below the waist by 3 inches shortened and knitted a narrower collar to compensate for the wrong yardage, which worked pretty well; I have 2 yds of the yarn left over. (Admittedly, the collar change did not begin as a purposeful alteration...the vest collar and left and right sides finishing instructions were not clear to me until I had put the left and right sides’ ribbing in wrong, and at that point I decided to leave them and change the collar).
The biggest Issue with this vest (besides me reading the collar and sides ribbing wrong) was that the yarn bleeds. My hands don’t sweat much as I knit (or ever for that matter), but I did end up with blue fingernails and palms. I’m not sure if the yarn dyed my needles; they just happened to be blue. I just washed the vest (in the washing machine in cold water on gentle, as the label suggests) which caused the yarn to pill and fuzz a bit (this always saddens me) but it appears that the vest no longer bleeds. Cross your fingers that I can pair it with a breezy cream top! And a belt. It needs a belt…
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