more EZ knitting

I thought I had blogged this sweater, but a quick browse through the minimal posts I've put up in the past few months shows me that I did not.

High on the success of my first two Zimmerman sweaters, I was anxious to whip up another one, this time in cotton. I got a great price on some Lion Cotton Ease from fabric.com (they have a small but nice yarn selection), due to an order snafu + a coupon they sent me, so I got two skeins of hazelnut for AJ, and 3 skeins of blossom for Daughter. In the end, with shipping, I think both sweaters cost maybe $20? Pretty sweet (though that doesn't include the buttons for Daughter's, nor the extra yarn I had to buy for AJ's...it's coming).

I knit up the cotton version with exactly the same numbers as the green wool version I'd previously knit. Rather than ribbing, I knit seed stitch for this version. But I guess it didn't occur to me that this cotton yarn would knit up to a different gauge than the wool. Wool has some give, and allows for a tighter gauge than this rather unforgiving cotton. So the sweater was coming out really boxy. But I didn't mind, because it was intended to go over other layers.

The problem became...yarn famine. Every knitter's nightmare! As I knit faster and faster toward the neckline (because somehow knitters believe if we just knit faster there will be enough yarn), it became sadly apparent that I would be quite literally just a few yards short for casting off.

Several 4-letter words later, I dug up a Joann's coupon and headed off to find more yarn. Of course the store does not carry the hazelnut colorway (at this point I would have accepted differing dye lots), so I had to go with the charcoal colorway as a complimentary color. That meant ripping the hazelnut neckline that I'd already knit, and reknitting it in the charcoal.

In the end, I like it a lot! I'd like to make another in cotton, as it's a great layer for autumn and spring. I would chop about an inch off the sleeves and add it to the body, but otherwise it's a winner.