A little Chickadee told me . . .

As soon as I finished my Hetty Cardigan, I started to knit the Chickadee cardi - a pattern by Ysolda Teague. The pattern has been published in the book a "Little red in the city". I don't have the book and only bought the cardi pattern from Ravelry. I really couldn't wait to get knitting this cardigan. Although it has the Chickadee fair isle pattern (which was what drew me initially to the cardigan), most of it is knitted in simple stockinette stitch. So having knitted Hetty, I really wanted to knit something simple without having to think about the pattern too much.

Yarn: Garnstudio DROPS Karisma Superwash. It was the first time that I used the brand and I just love it. So far, I think this wool feels best in comparison with the brands I have used before. It's super soft and was nice to knit with.

Instructions: I love the instructions, because the pattern has little gaps where usually the numbers of repeats are. You just have to look into a table, find out the numbers of repeats for your size and fill it into the gap. So no confusion with other sizes, genius!

Construction: I'm not going into detail here, but you can find some more infos on my Ravelry page. It was the first time that I tried a fair isle pattern and it was challenging, but manageable. The birds are not perfect yet with the tension being far from even. But after I wet blocked the cardigan the bird design smoothed out a bit and now they look great :) I think I had to start the first row of the fair isle pattern three times because I just kept making mistakes with the order of the yarns.

The cardigan is knitted from the top down and after knitting the yoke, I had to knit the sleeves. I liked that a lot. Because that means your are already done with the sleeves when starting on the bodice and they are not looming at the end of the knitting, yeah. These sleeves were the fastest I ever knit, it took me only four evenings to finish them.

My main problem was knitting the neckband/buttonband/hem bit. It is knitted altogether in the round in garter stitch. Meaning you have the complete outer edge (hem- left buttonband - neckband - right buttonband - hem) on your needles. So one row took me about 30 min and to knit the whole edging it took me about 6 hours! Because you have the whole cardigan on your needles, you can't try it on and that's why I didn't realised that my edging was too big. So imagine, a totally excited me trying on the cardigan in front of the mirror. Realising that the neck edging stood up making me look like Dracula. There was no way it would stay like that.

It took me almost a week to finally gather my courage and frog the edging. I then knitted the edging on smaller needles because I had read that often garter stitch turns out bigger than stockinette stitching. I also only knitted half of the edging rows to prevent the neckline from being to close to my neck. And this time it worked. The neckline lies flat against my collar bone :)

I think the buttons I used are a bit to small. They look nice with the cardigan, but tend to spring open when I'm wearing it. You might have noticed the open button in a few of the photographs already---my photographer obviously didn't. Also, I should have added a few more buttons in general as there is a lot of strain on the yoke and I think one more button there would have divided the strain.

There is no more left to say. Thus I wish you all a good start into the coming week and if you get ever tired or stressed get a cuppa tea :)