FO: Lauriel Cardigan

Pattern: Lauriel by Ysolda Teague
Yarn: Rowan Calmer, 8½ x 50g in colour: #500
Needles: 4mm circs of various lengths

*does excessively energetic happy dance*

Readers, Lauriel is done. I achieved my aim of wearing it on my birthday yesterday, and the weather was sunny to boot so even had a nice photo session in the garden.

I cannot put into words how it feels to have a cardigan fit so well for once in my life. I have grown to accept over the years that I am an odd shape and that shop-bought clothes will never fit well, so being able to alter something to the tiniest degree to make it fit feels like complete indulgence. I fear I will now never be able to knit something that can’t be altered, though, because I will just be dissatisfied with the end result.

Lauriel was the first pattern that really called out to me from Little Red in the City because of the underbust shaping. Most clothes I have tend to hang from my bust with lots of fabric flapping around my waist which makes me feel like a cube on legs. I also liked the scoop neckline (maybe this is a sign that Bettie isn’t for me!) and, most importantly, it totally satisfied my love of lacy leaf patterns.

I have mentioned the modifications I did to the pattern over the course of knitting Lauriel, but to summarise:

• I decreased fewer stitches while working the short row yoke shaping to have more stitches at the front to accommadate the boobage
• I decreased these extra stitches by working k3tog instead of k2tog at the underbust shaping point
• I gave the body a-line shaping by increasing from 36 inches under the bust to 42 inches at the waist.
• I worked fewer rows of ribbing at the waist so that it didn’t pull in too much.

I love Calmer. It was really nice to knit with once the initial, blimey-this-yarn-is-stretchy, feeling passed and it looks great after blocking, even if it did take ages to dry. Please Rowan, don’t discontinue this yarn!

I also adore the buttons I ended up using, and Textile Garden are really quick and efficient and don’t charge excessively for posting a tiny envelope. I’ll definitely look for more buttons from them for future projects. I do hate the plastic snap fasteners, though. I liked the idea of them being unobtrusive but I had to replace four of them because they didn’t fasten at all. This invoked a fair amount of cursing because after sewing on twenty four individual pieces of fastener, I really didn’t appreciate having to re-do them! However, at some point I will unpick and replace the other eight as well. Probably not for a good while yet, though.

I am really supremely chuffed with this cardigan, and can’t think of a bad thing to say about it! I think I am just going to enjoy the feeling of finishing something that fits and is for me for a while before I start looking at yarns for my next selfish project.