I adapted the pattern to knit in the round and steek the front opening, the armholes and the neckline. I also knitted the sleeves at the same time in the round with a bridge of stitches in between (siamese sleeves). Eunny Jang’s steeking tutorials were really helpful. It ended up fitting quite well in spite of my worries :)

I wrote the notes below while part way through the project:

Let me start by saying that I love this cardigan, I love the colours I’ve chosen and it’s more or less a doddle to knit the pattern. I spent rather too long swatching as I decided that I wanted to try steeks for the first time, so would have to adapt the pattern. Mainly, the issue is the picot hem - if i folded it over and then folded the steek in, it would be four layers thick at the hem. To counteract that I’ve knitted the picot hem flat before joining to knit in the round. The Jamieson’s knits up on 3mm needles at 30 stitches per 4”, so the cardigan should come up a bit smaller than the pattern. This is good, as the pattern comes out with about 2.4-4.5 positive ease. Maybe that’s ok with a drapey superwash wool, but in the stiffer spindrift, I think that would be far too much. My projected finished measurements are:

bust: 34
waist: 30
bottom: 34.5

I cast on 255 stitches (65+129+65, less 6 stitches for the mitres, plus 2 seam stitches).

I increased one stitch at the end of the next six rows and then one more stitch at one end of the next row - this is because I’m planning a crocheted steek, which requires an uneven number of stitches in the steek band - I chose 7, as I wanted a nice narrow hem. I joined and started working in the round on the next row.

In spite of my careful calculations, I’m managing to make a total dog’s dinner of it.

It started with getting carried away with the pattern and forgetting to start the waist decreases, which start very quickly. Instead of pulling back half a dozen rows, I recalculated them to decrease every 5 rows instead of every six. I forgot to recalculate all of the decreases and increases according to the fact that a) my row gauge is off at 30 rows per 4” and b) that I wanted my cardigan to be shorter on account of me being a shortarse. Once I started increasing for the bust, I realised that I wasn’t going to have done all of the necessary increases but the time I needed to start the armhole shaping, so I started increasing more rapidly at every 5 rows instead of every 10. Then I tried it on. Now obviously I need to take into account the extra steek stitches - it’s a bit hard to just pin these in as they’re not that wide - and then I need to add a bit on for the buttonband as well - which is narrow, but nevertheless, adds a bit on, so perhaps I only need to deduct about a half inch for the steek stitches.

So here’s the rub. It’s big. I’ve knit about 11” of the body and when I orient the waist shaping, I’ll need to knit it about 3” longer than I intended. I don’t think I’ll run out of yarn or anything, and it won’t be too long, but I still think it might be a bit loose. I could always take a few more body stitches into the steek seams…it’s a little bit puckered with the floats, but only the tiniest amount. I don’t think my swatch stretched, I think the stitches just redistributed themselves.

I’ve done about three days of knitting - things could be worse - I could just pull it all out and start again on smaller needles, or take a few stitches out, but I really don’t want to!

GRRRRRRRRRR!

OK, so the body/armholes/neck has now had the steeks cut (7 stitches wide stripes- crocheted steeks with a bit of hand sewing reinforcement at the cast on and cast off edges). The crocheting took a while as the yarn is a bit sticky.

I’m now on to the sleeves, which are proving problematic also. I started off thinking that I might knit them both at the same time with steeks in between them as I struggle to keep my gauge constant in colourwork - I’ve ended up with one sock bigger than the other before now. In the end I tried to do two at a time in the round, but I had too many ends so they were getting tangled. So I separated them but was having problems with the colour changes - I tried:

leaving the ends hanging to sew in later - result - too loose

weaving the ends in and out as I went - result - too slow and confusing - some rows required both colours to be changed so I would be weaving out 2 colours and weaving in 2 colours at the same time.

russian joins - result - too slow, a bit bullky

fast forward 2-3 days of getting nowhere and I went back to plan A. I googled it and was reassured to find it described by Lucy Neatby as ‘siamese sleeves’ and others appear to have tried it with some success. Additional tweaks - provisional cast on so that the cuffs can be picked up and knitted in the round at the end, eliminating problems of extra thickness around the hem (I hope). Plus, I’m changing colour using a combination of the russian join technique and felted join. I found it somewhere on here but can’t re-find it now..

Siamese sleeves are going well, but I’ve had some problems with the sleeve cap shaping as my row gauge is off - so I have fudged it somewhat :)