I love this! What a great pattern! What a great cardigan! I’m going to wear it a LOT. It’s zigging zagging fun from start to finish, with beautiful top-down set-in sleeves, an integrated button band, and the cleverest slash pockets ever. If you’ve never done one of Åsa’s Ziggurat patterns, prepare to be baffled, mystified, and then utterly utterly charmed. If you’re a Ziggurat veteran, then you’d better knit this one too, because it’s a winner!

And let me just take a moment to rave about the yarn. Oh, the yarn!! This was my first time using Mondegreen. It’s an absolute joy to knit, but the real magic happens with blocking…when it becomes smooth and drapey while retaining its lofty warmth, and all of it with a glorious sheen! I am madly in love.

Just a note about the photos: I was horribly self-conscious about posting photos of my fat self, but then decided that maybe the self-consciousness alone was a good enough reason to do it. I’ve gained a lot of weight because of health conditions, and I do not want to feel ashamed of my appearance. I do feel ashamed, of course, because I’ve lived my whole life surrounded by western civilization, but that shame conflicts with my open-minded world view, so I have to find a way to work with it.

I feel strongly that body acceptance and size acceptance is a feminist issue, not an emotional one. If I make it political, I can view my efforts as activism and that changes the whole energy of it for me!

Judging by the number of private responses to these images, it’s working. I want to reclaim fat as an adjective, not an insult!! And I want all the lovely round or lumpy ladies of Ravelry to feel like the wonderful, beautiful, powerful people they really are…and not like shameful second-class citizens because their bodies don’t conform to an impossible norm.

It grew with blocking rather more than I expected based on my blocked swatch, and I had already chosen a size to give me some ease…so it’s definitely more of a coat than a cardigan. But I love it this way! However, if I were to knit it again in the same yarn (which I’m probably going to do, very soon), I would probably go down a size.

Note: When knitting the pockets, be sure to make the slipped-stitch band rather loose. I had to stretch my pocket trim aggressively while blocking to make it lie flat. You might also take care to keep the slipped-stitch button band a tiny bit loose as well.

Also note: The sleeve cuffs are meant to be turned back, so knit the sleeves long enough to accommodate it. (Although I quite like them not turned.)

Modifications:
Did the “busty” size bust darts.

Extra increases below the waist to flatter my generous curves.

Knitted bottom band long enough to accommodate two buttonholes, spaced the same as the others (because bottom band happened to start just before I needed to make a buttonhole).

Somehow ended up with extra stitches in the sleeves when it came time to separate them, so I used the stitch counts for the largest sleeve size (I have big arms, and this allows me to wear a layer or two underneath). Made sleeve decreases more quickly than called for, to get back to the size 46 stitch count without making the arms too long.