It was a slow knit because of lots of todo´s, thin yarn, wonderful details and much thinking of colour-combis and stripe shading… It is a simple shaped, but bacause of all details, extraordinary cardi!

My experience with crazy Zauberball:

1.) The colour repeat ist loooooong!

2.) there are different kinds of crazy Zauberball: some are very colourful, two ore three colours mixed with different shades of grey and finaly black. (like U-Boot, Wurzelsepp, Frische Fische). And all these different colours are mixed in the scape. Some other skeins are only one colour and different shades of dark grey and black. (like Olivenstraße and Charisma.) (You can check this out on the yarn page.) These are much easier for the stripes! The skeins with more colours and mixtures of them are more difficult. Maby you wont catch a certain colour in your stripes, then take control by a scissor: I cut out parts of the strand I don´t want in my stripes (I want to have only the darker parts)

3.) If you want to have an equable striping process in the upper part you have to prepare single strands (take care that they are long enough for 2 rows). Prepare some strands for every of your three parts (1 backyoke and 2 for the fronts). So you can get the imagination of one stripe without a heavy colour break, over all three parts.

Yes, this includes many ends to weave in! But some of us prefered this method. You can read about it in the FG-Group.

Rililie brought it to the point on pattern-page 7: “Notes in colour-change”. I think, it is important for a good colour combiation to choose a special part of the zauberball strand for bonding the CC of the sleeves. She said “… the same effect of one colour melting in the next with the use of the stripes…” Thats it!

Hope that all sounds not to complicate:-))))

I took over control for the rest of the body for the striping.

My experience with th buttonholes

At first: They need more time then usual buttonholes knitted in a row. The outstanding thing is, that both edges are bind of edges. If you work the point of contact from both sides in the right way, it looks like a closed chain of stitches is running around the hole. It looks very nice and the result is a very firm hole.

To sew the short strand, left from the cut row, is a bit tricky. Sometimes I used a crochet hook if the tapestry needle was to long and the strand often slips through the needle eye.

It is good to know, that there is a way to add a buttonhole in a finished piece.

More work but perfect bottonhole! And Rililie´s Tutorial is realy well written!

State of progress:

30. Jan. 14:
OMG! What a colour desaster!
First I ordered my maincolour. Wanted a light grey. At the Wollmeise shop there was Q.E.D., a light grey. I checked some project pictures and thought that´s my colour. But Q.E.D. is a light, warm, brownish grey. Then I ordered my Olivenstraße Zauberball… not shure if that green matches the warm grey… Just in case I ordered 5 more Zauberbälle (pural of ball=bälle) in different colours!

3. Feb. 14:
Olivenstraße didn´t match. The warm grey slurps the flashy green, not enough contrast! After an afternoon crawling through my wardrobe, checking my summerskirts and ended up in high confusion, I made my decision:

U-Boot! A Zauberball in Blue-Black-Turquoise and a spit of light (cold) grey.

It matches a few of my handmade skirts perfect, but not all. But seriously: This is not my solely summer-cardi.

Hope that knitting will take less time than deciding colour-combos…

4. Feb. 14:
Casted on

5. Feb. 14:
Frogged the finished backpart. I started the stripes with the beginning thread of the Zauberball. The stripes start in light, contrastless grey… I redid the backpart and cut out strands in colours I want to have beneath the black sleeves.

16. Feb. 14:
Thats my plan of striping:
After black stripes beneath the little shoulder saddle in black, floating in stripes with a portion of black thread at the upper part, I try to make the stripes at the body, after joining the back- and frontparts, in blue (from mixed blue tuquoise to solid blue) and change to lighter tourquise stripes to highlight the waist.

17. Feb. 14:
I unraveled the complete skein to get black strands for the sleeve striping. THERE IS NO COLOUR REPEAT!!! IT IS ABSOLUTLY CHAOTIC!!! I found two more parts with solid black. This means, that there are only three parts with solid black (the third part I used for the shouder striping) in the whole skein! So this could mean that in this half kilometer of yarn are only three colour repeats!!!

1. Mar. 14:
First sleeve is done. I´m very happy with my stripes! Continued controlling of colourscape. Stripes are melting out of the black and turning from blue into turquoise. Second sleeve will be less work because of only repeating the stripes from the first sleeve. I´ve prepared tiny skeins for every stripe.

8. Mar. 14:
It is a short cardi, but it was far to short. After finishing the second sleeve I decided to unravel my tubular bind of (!!!!) an added one more stripe (a final number of 17). After that I knitted 20 more rows in MC and 9 rows ribbing befor starting the 2 preparing rows and, one more time, tubular bind of.

12. Mar. 14:
To get more stuff at the neck, I worked short rows over the complete neckline (including the backpart).

14. Mar. 14:
Last strand is secured… needed 7 stiches for every buttonhole.
It´s done!

17. April 14:
Finaly tooked pictures at a short trip to Barcelona with wonderful light in our apartement.