Wedding: Featherweight Cardigan

When I started planning my wedding dress it was clear to my that I would not only sew a dress but also knit a a cardigan. I simply love the combination dress/cardigan and I knew I would need it, as the wedding took place in winter. When I planned the cardigan back in November I really thought that this cardigan would be enough to keep me warm during the day. Oh how wrong I was!

Finding a pattern that I liked wasn’t that hard. I have bought a lot of apptern over tzhe past 2 or 3 years and I do have some favorites. Most of them are Andi Satterlund’s designs. But for this occasion her designs seemed to bulky for me. Plus the all have a low neckline and I thunk it does look a bit peculiar, if the neckline of the dress is a lot higher than the neckline of the cardigan. And as my dress had a very high neckline i wanted a cardigan with either a high neckline or with no neckline at all. And so I settled with the Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig, thousand of knitters have knit this cardigan! It is very plain and simple looking, plus it has no real closure and looks more like a scarf with sleeves. Perfect for my purposes.

After making that decision I was kind of clueless about what yarn and color would work best. But I do have this knitting group, the meeting are in a yarn store. How convenient. I let the girl make the choice, and they did make a great choice. The yarn is Sophie de luxe by Bremont yarns. It is 70 % alpaca, 20 % silk and 10 % cashmere and it feels soo great. It is a little shiny and I like that! Also it is very expensive. The skeins are 25 g only and knitting with 3.0 and 3.5mm needles I used up 10 skeins. Each skein cost about 6.8 €, I cannot really recall. There were only 10 skeins left in the store and I bought them all. I managed to knit long sleeves but the neck binding is a little bit shorter than it should have been.

I’m really happy with how the cardigan turned out. But well, I chose safety here, the design is really very plain. But the focus should be on my dress plus the color of the cardigan is enough of an eye catcher. I wasn’t that happy with the instructions though. They literally fill half a page. Half a page. There is nothing in them that you couldn’t have guessed from looking at a finished cardigan, the instructions are so sparse!

Also the fit wasn’t right. The cardigan was way too tiny. I sensed that when I read that I only had to pick up 2 sts underneath each sleeve! 2 stitches! That’s nothing! And So after completing this step I tried the thing on and it was way to snug, so I ribbed a little and went with one size up (which was 35,5 “, I originally knit 32″) for the raglan increases and I picked up 6 sts underneath each sleeve. For the waist decreases I went down again to th stitches count of size 32”.

I forgot to mention that this cardigan is knit from the top down. The raglan sleeves do not directly begin at the neck, there is something like a shoulder seam. At the end you simply knit a neckband to the finished sweater. What really confused me is that in most of the pictures the neckband is knit p1k1, but the instruction says to simply knit, so that the neckband rolls up. I went with the rolled version. All in all the design of this cardigan is super easy, the instructions are way too short and there was no benefit for me in buying the pattern. I didn’t learn anything , plus I had to improvise either way, because the sizing was wrong. I would not recommend this pattern to anyone, especially not to beginners, as they might not notice that something is off and would also not know how to fix that. I cannot understand how this pattern got so popular…

However, I think I made a pretty decent cardigan and I simply love that color and shape! I think the cardigan fits my dress and thus I accomplished my mission! :)

Ater buying the wool I started to look out for everything in that particular color. I managed to get nail polish and make-up and also those roses in my hair have a pretty similar color. But finding silk or any other fabric in that color was impossible to me.

I also thought that it would be easy to find snow boots in a similar color. The idea for the boots also came from my knitting group. We all thought that would be fun detail in my outfit. I looked everywhere for matching shoes! In the end I had to buy them thrifted. I bought two different pairs, both high Emu Boots. The first pair was too dark, the second one to pale. In th end I went with the pale ones, gave up and also went with pale pink silk for Marvin’s Tie and my waist band. Wouldn’t have thought that this part would get so hard.

When I bought the shoes I still thought that they would be a gimmick, just for fun and for the pictures. During the wedding I was so lucky to have them. It was so cold and I definitely wouldn’t have gotten through making all those pictures without them.

And the cardigan alone would have been enough either. Way to cold. But I realized that early enough and managed to stay warm. But that is another story. I’ll tell you next week ;)

If you want you can also visit the project page on ravelry :)

Macht’s gut!

Katharina