At the start of May, I fell in love with some yarn. Specifically, I fell in love with the Edinburgh fade set, dyed by Circus Tonic Handmade, and featured in the Sisters Spotlight by Skein Sisters. I fell in love with this set so hard that I bought two sets of it (that's twelve 4-ply demi-skeins!!) and decided that I would make a cardigan out of it.
A bit of background…
A few weeks earlier, I'd seen a beautiful instagram post of the amazing All of the Lights cardigan by Joji Locatelli, so I figured I'd make that.
But
It called for so much yarn!!
It called for so much 8-ply/DK yarn!!
…
DK technically stands for Double Knitting yarn...
The solution was simple, of course!
Once I saw the Edinburgh fade set, I knew I wanted the All of the Lights cardigan knit up in it. But because it was fingering, and the pattern called for DK, I bought two sets, figuring that with 6 demi-skeins of 4-ply in one set, that should be the equivalent of 3 regular skeins of 4-ply, meaning ~1200m
Adding the second set would give me an equivalent of ~1200 DK, and the pattern asks for 1339m of DK in the smallest size…
YIKES!
Only in writing this out right now have I realised why it feels like I've been going through the yarn faster than I've been going through the pattern!!!
Honestly, I thought I had way more yarn than I needed when I bought this in the shop.. Looking at my maths now, I have no idea what I was thinking when I thought that this would be ok…
I bought two of these!!
Anyway…
I bought what I was sure was more than enough yarn, and then immediately sat down to read through the pattern. I had two matching fade sets, that I needed to knit held together, and I wanted this cardigan to fade like a cardigan has never faded before.
I eventually figured out that I wanted to finish one skein halfway through working the other skein, so that I could attach the next skein halfway through, and fade the skeins together that way. This means that for the 6 skeins of varying shades, I'd knit together 1a/1b, then 2a/1b, then 2a/2b, then 3a/2b, then 3a/3b, etc..
It's a little bit embarrassing, how long it took me to come up with this…
[Strap yourselves in, readers! It's time for a lot of percentages!]
The next embarrassing thing is how long it took me to figure out how to actually get to this ideal of joining in a new skein every half-skein of knitting. Finally I realised that I could do this by winding off 25% of my first skein, and working with that held double with the remaining 75% of the skein, so that when the first 25% ran out, I should have 50% left, and be ready to join in the second skein.
This was when I discovered that the skeins were not actually 50g as I had thought
The first skein that I wound up was actually 71g! That's way more than the 50g I had been expecting! I weighed a few more random skeins, and found that they seemed to range from ~60 to ~75 grams each! So maybe I do have enough yarn after all!! (Although at the time, I already thought I had enough, and just thought I had way more than I needed…)
I was finally ready to cast on, and… I have to make a confession here. I didn't swatch.
I also ignored the instructions that said this pattern was designed to gave a generous amount for positive ease, and I decided to just go for the smallest size, because that matched my shoulder span. I was going to knit this cardigan without all the positive ease it called for, because that's just how I like my cardigans to fit!
I cast on with my 25% and 75% balls of the first skein in the set, and once I ran out of the 25% ball, I joined in the first skein in the second set (spit joins for life!!).
I kept knitting until I have the top shoulder section all knitted , and thankfully all completed in the first of the six colourways.
I have no idea what I would have done at that point if I ran out part of the way through…
Anyway.. I finished the top band, and I decided that I liked the shoulder width of the smallest size of the pattern.. So far so good!
The next step did not happen immediately though.. I looked at the pattern, and looked at my glorious fade sets, and looked back at the pattern again.
Here's where you need to know a little bit about garment construction, and different ways that sleeves can make their way into a torso-covering garment. This particular cardigan is designed with set in sleeves. After knitting that top shoulder band, I have something that for all intents and purposes is a long narrow rectangle, with live stitches on the short end that will eventually continue from the shoulder down the sleeve, and along the two long edges, one of them is to be picked up for the back, and the other long edge is split into two parts to pick up for the left and right fronts. The pattern tells me to pick up the stitches for the back first, and knit the pattern down until I reach the length where the armpit will be
Then I pick up the left front and knit down to match
And the right front and knit down to match
And then I get to connect it all together, forming a fancy vest, until I finish the body, and then go back and pick up stitches for the sleeves.
For sane people who are happy to stick with just one colourway for their sleeved garments, this works completely fine. However, having decided that I want a beautiful faded cardigan through six different shades of yarn, life is not as simple...
The first problem is obviously that I can't possibly expect a nice fade if I start picking up stitches for a sleeve after I finish the body, if I am constantly just joining in darker and darker shades of the fade set. That first sleeve join would be a big contrast! And the second sleeve would be even worse!!
The other problem, though, is that if I finish the first skein while knitting the upper back panel, then the fronts would start off slightly darker than the back.. And what if the right front starts off even darker again!
The easy solution for this is obviously to just do a seamless construction, increasing for sleeves instead of picking up the stitches later… This was easy enough to execute, once I stopped trying to flip back and forth from Right Front to Sleeve to Back to Sleeve to Left Front sections and then back the other way… I actually wrote out all the sections in order on one page, just so that I could stay sane and see what was next before I had enough rows to "read" which chart I was on.
I eventually got into the swing of things, and knit back and forth increasing for sleeves until I got enough sleeve stitches on the needles (more than the small size called for, because I always need to add extra arm circumference).
At this point, I had to stop and just put everything down for a few days while I had another little freak out
Working across the fronts and back and tops of shoulders was all well and good while joining in a new skein every so often, but I was going to need a whole new strategy once I split for the sleeves.
Do I wind off separate balls and just continue the body, and hope that the sleeves line up later? Working sleeves TAAT is fine, but a standard ball of yarn only has two ends, and simultaneously working the body as well on super long needles/magic loop would require an elusive third end that would necessitate some scary yarn cutting!
Or do I work the sleeves first, and hopefully leave enough amounts of yarn for the body, so that once I hit the body the sleeves are finished and it's all smooth sailing? (this is how I worked my previous two cardigans, albeit unfaded)
These strategies all required some element of trusting that I would stop at the right point, and be able to keep all the balls of yarn in order for when I went back to work other parts, and with so many different shades I really wasn't willing to risk that
So I ended up at another option.
1. Weigh the smaller ball of yarn (three times!!)
2. Count the live stitches on sleeves and body
3. Calculate the total number of stitches, and sleve/body stitches as a percentage of the total
4. Calculate the weight of yarn that should be used for each sleeve and the body
5. Work the first section (body or sleeve) while constantly weighing the smaller ball of yarn, until the correct percentage has been used, keeping track of what row I finished
6. Cut the yarn, and join to the next part to be worked
7. Work next part until same row is reached
8. Repeat 6 and 7 for third part (and notice how bad my estimation was because I still had more yarn left than expected)
9. Repeat steps 1-8 joining in other ball as required (hopefully within the first few rows) until reaching the next checkpoint in the pattern
Whew! That's a lot of steps! And a lot of yarn weighing! And a lot of yarn cutting and joining!!
I have my strategy for the yarn cutting and joining though, at least
I cut the two yarns maybe 20cm apart, and spit splice them separately, so that the joins don't coincide.. The most loose ends I'll have floating around if things work their way out should be two strands (half of one of the two 4-ply yarns) at any one spot. And the spit splice has been working well, so really, I'm expecting no loose ends.
I've been working my way through the cycle of weighing yarn, counting stitches (the sleeve stitch count is slowly decreasing), and cutting/joining yarn for different sections, and so far I think I'm going ok.. I'm just getting a little bit apprehensive because I should be reaching the pockets before I finish the sleeves, and then I'll have to figure out a new strategy again!!
Stay tuned for pocket shenanigans, once I get my head around that!!