This is my first ever sweater and first ever fitted garment that isn’t socks. It’s knitting up super fast (if I had a couple days where I did little else I could probably finish it within a matter of days). Life’s obligations are causing it to take a few weeks with only intermittent knitting time.

I intend to wear this cardigan over a dress (I love Andi Satterlund’s style!) and I want to wear it in warm weather while indoors in cool air conditioning. Therefore I want the sleeves to be rather on the short side. Instead of following the pattern as written I did a cap sleeve with ribbing in pattern on the cap edging, rather than a tube of short sleeve knitting. I just tried things on as I went and I am pleased with the results so far.

As of this writing (4/28) the cardigan is done except for the button band. Still need to track down some good matching green buttons.

Update: now that the cardigan is done and the event I was making it for has passed I can announce what this was for:

My wedding!

I ended up making a few changes from the last time I updated this. I had a hard time finding green buttons as what I found was not quite right for things. My wedding was a very informal wedding, so anything too frilly/sparkly was out. Anything too plain was also out as it was too far on the opposite end - too casual for a wedding. Also the color of green proved to be a difficult color to match - it’s exactly the same color as the Amazon Green color of Converse Chuck Taylor shoes - a bright Christmasy or St Patrick’s green. One wouldn’t think that would be too hard to match but as it turns out, it is.

The other issue was that my dress was a retro-styled swing dress with polka dots and a wide crinoline, and the cut over my bustline and waist meant that I needed to make the cardigan a little shorter to stop right where the dress started its A shape out. If I stopped the cardigan at the standard length, it didn’t allow the dress to flare out where it needed to flare, and things didn’t look quite right.

So, I undid it and ripped back so it was about four inches shorter. I placed the bottom row of eyelets at my under-bust line and put a few inches of ribbing on just below it. Now the silhouette looked right. That reduced the number of buttons to three, which I just evenly spaced out.

I ended up selecting white chunky buttons from Hobby Lobby. While they weren’t green nor polka dotted they were sort of reminiscent of the polka dotted look as white dots, and matched well enough in a mismatched sort of way. If the cardigan is worn separately from the dress it would be an odd match, but when all worn together it looks great.

This was a very quick knit. I had the cardigan completed only a few weeks after I began. It took way longer to sort out the button situation and to try everything on and realize it needed to be shorter for this particular application than it did for any other task.