it's a big yellow sweater

Since it's pretty much winter around these parts, I'm working on adjusting my photography schedule. I'm almost never home during daylight hours, so pretty much all photographing has to take place on the weekends, until the days start getting a bit longer again. So, this weekend, with Jared around the house (another rare occurrence!) I took advantage of the daylight to get a bunch of photos of some recently completed projects.

The first, and most exciting, is this sweater. It literally took me two weeks. And no, I am not a speed knitter. This was knit with super bulky yarn on size 19 needles. My mom actually suggested that I just use turkey basters, which actually would have been almost right. Let me tell you...size 19 needles are HUGE!

I picked up this yarn last spring at the annual Textile Center garage sale. Can I just say that this event has become one of my favorites each spring? Really, it's pretty awesome. And last spring, for the first time in the few years I've been going to this sale, there were a bunch of boxes of Blue Sky Alpaca yarn at majorly discounted prices. There were a few boxes of the bulky hand dyes and a few boxes of some lighter weight yarn. And while I was standing there agonizing about how much to get and which color I should choose, they cut the price in half. And I jumped on 10 skeins of the bulky hand dyes in this amazing goldenrod color.

I had a hard time finding a sweater pattern for this weight yarn, and eventually settled on a Twinkle pattern- seems like most of her patterns are for super bulky yarn, so it was a perfect fit. If you're looking for a super bulky project- I'd recommend checking out one of her books. After going back and forth a bit between the Twinkle Hoodie, and this pattern, the Best Friend Cardigan. I settled on the cardigan and finally got to work on it a couple of weeks ago.

This was a fairly straightforward pattern, though I would recommend it to someone with a bit of pattern reading experience. Even though it's not a difficult pattern at all, I found the pattern to be written pretty vaguely. Also, the sizing is a little wacky. I certainly don't consider myself to be a large in almost anything, except this sweater. Well, the body of the sweater...It turns out I'm a small in the sleeves but a large in the sweater. After blocking I decided the sleeves were not only too long, but also too wide, so I ripped them out and made the size small sleeves, and shortened them a few inches (which turned out to be slightly too short, but I'd rather too short than too long) and that worked out perfectly. It didn't even take any finagling to fit the sleeves into the armholes, despite the different sizes.

So there you have it, my best friend cardigan. I'm contemplating adding two pockets to the front on both sides of the button band...Back later this week with yet another finished knitting project!

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Pattern: Best Friend Cardigan, by Twinkle (Wenlan Chia)
Yarn: Bulky Hand Dyes, by Blue Sky Alpaca
Needles: Size 19 circulars
Modifications: I omitted the bobbles, and just did plain cables. I also knitted the size small sleeves to go with the size large body and shortened the sleeves by 3".

{on ravelry here}