Cassidy

Cassidy is finished!!!

I was inspired by my knitterly friend, Mo, who has knit 3 Cassidys including one she modified to fit her daughter. It won first place at our local fair in the children's cardigan category last June.

Photo by M. Foulds

I used Cascade 220 yarn, colourway 9336.

Cassidy is a hoodie but I chose, instead, to knit a collar rather than a hood. It took me a couple of hours yesterday afternoon to design the collar. I looked at the different versions people had done on Ravelry and chose to use the elements of the existing pattern. I picked up the stitches around the collar from the right side and then turned and began knitting the right side of the collar continuing from the wrong side of the cardigan. That way, when the collar was folded to the outside its right side would show.

The waist shaping is built into the pattern through a series of decreases and increases and was easy to match when doing the fronts.

I knit a couple of extra inches of length and knit the sleeves in the round to avoid having to seam them.

I reinforced the stitches on the back of the neck by crocheting firmly along the seam line with a slightly smaller hook than the knitting needle I used. That prevents the neck and collar from stretching laterally and along with the shoulder seams adds to the structure of the top of the sweater.

There really are only three cable patterns. the 2 smaller ones are over 4 rows and involve only 3 sts. The 'antler' cable is over 11 sts (5 on each side of a central stitch) and 6 rows.

When picking up stitches for the button bands and collar, I used the same size needle and picked up 3 sts and then skipped the 4th.

The pattern doesn't give much direction about how to do the buttonholes. I knew I wanted buttons that were approximately 1" wide so I did a double yarnover where I wanted the button hole and on the next row, just knit one stitch into it. After the fact, I found 25mm buttons that fit nicely through the buttonhole that also matched the yarn colour pretty well.

In keeping with my 'sweater-a-year' goal. This is my 2011 sweater.