Start to Finish: Channel Cardigan

The Channel Cardigan begins with casting on stitches for the entire body of the sweater; for my size that is over two hundred stitches to cast on. Rather than trying to estimate the amount of yarn needed to long-tail cast on that many stitches I used both ends of my wound yarn to cast on. 

However, if you've wound your yarn into balls, or can't find both ends, you can generally estimate one inch of yarn per cast on stitch for worsted weight yarn. To test how much tail you need, you can cast on a stitch, mark the beginning and end of the yarn you just used, pull out the cast on stitch to see the length of yarn you used and multiply that length by the number of stitches you need to cast on. I like using the two-end method because I don't need to estimate anything and that's worth having an extra tail of yarn to weave in at the end. 

Since I took this project on vacation with me I was able to get quite a bit done. Unfortunately, I was having such a nice time that I didn't realize that I neglected to  change the needle size after the ribbing and had to rip out about 8 inches of knitting. After throwing a little tantrum I ripped out the necessary length and got the sweater back on the correct needle size. 

There is a lot of texture knit into this cardigan and it's slow going at first but once the stitch patterns are established it's quite easy to keep track of where you are in the pattern.  

I'm just past the waist decreases and, as I mentioned in my previous post, I'm skipping the belt so I omitted the eyelets used to make the belt loops. The next section of the pattern includes waist increases and front shaping decreases for that large shawl collar. As soon as I reach the part of the pattern where the fronts and back are divided for the raglan sleeves I'm going to stop knitting and figure out the math for converting this to a set-in sleeve cardigan.