Fine Sand

I wrote, back in August that I was knitting the 'Fine Sand' cardigan, designed by Heidi Kirrmaier.  I finished it two weeks ago, just before our knitting weekend in Blackpool, and I have been wearing it a lot since then.  But it's taken until now to get some photos organised.

I guess you could describe it as 'deceptively simple'.  It's just a plain ordinary cardigan, but there are no seams, so it sits very smoothly over the shoulders - no shoulder seams, no armhole seams.  But of course, to create that 3-d shape without any seams, you need to incorporate a lot of shaping into the knitting.    In this design, the shaping is not made a feature of, unlike in her Vitamin D design, for instance, and it's even less evident knitted in a fuzzy yarn like Wendy Ramsdale, which is what I have used.   But you can perhaps see the radiating lines of increases across the back yoke.

One thing I particularly like is that the fronts don't gape at the bottom.  You would think that to make a cardigan intended to be worn unfastened, you should just make the front edges parallel with the sides - but if you do that, the front opening tends to be an inverted V, because most women are wider at hip level than higher up.  In 'Fine Sand', there are increases all down the front edges, to take account of that, and so the front edges hang more or less vertically.

I have made a couple of changes to the design.  There is short-row shaping in the pattern, so that the back is lower than the fronts, but I decided not to do that, and my cardigan finishes at the same level all the away round.  And I did several more rows of the garter stitch that runs all round the edge, to make a more definite band.  (I added an extra stitch in the casting off, at the points of the corners, to make them a bit more definite.)

 

So it's a very nice wearable cardigan.  The yarn, Wendy Ramsdale, is lovely - soft, a bit fuzzy, nice to knit with, and the colour is beautiful.  (Very hard to photograph blue accurately, as you can see from the variations in the photos, but it is a very nice rich blue with quite a lot of grey. The Thomas B Ramden website shows it better.)   The yarn is hand-wash only, so I shall have to be careful - on the other hand, it does split-splice very well, so there were only a few ends to sew in when I had finished knitting. Success!