They sure used a lot of yarn in the 80s…

I have been slacking in my updating, apparently. But not in my knitting, that’s for sure.

After a break from Rogue when I realised that mittens and scarves are a must for Sweden in February (well, it was February then anyway) I picked it up again and have been knitting furiously ever since. This is a somewhat strange picture of the completely finished body, since I had to stuff my hair into the hood to not cover the cable detail on it, lift my right arm to show the cable on the side of the body while keeping a stubborn door closed with the other. Thank God that I have the self-taking kind of camera. Which I can’t remember the word for right now, so “self-taking” it is.

Let me just say this: I never buy patterns. I like to make up my own. Tweak free patterns to fit my taste. And so on. This is the first pattern I’ve ever paid money for, and I have to say that it’s freaking amazing. So perfect. I love it! It’s worth every cent of its six dollars and I will probably make more than one of these. When I’ve rested from the cables and stockinette stitch, that is.

My mom has knitted since before I was born. Her stitches are so even that it’s scary, and she can do intarsia and fair isle without the least little difference in tension, and such. But she’s also of the school “make do with what you have” (“man tager vad man haver, sa Cajsa Warg”). So, when my sister asked for a black and pink striped cardigan, mom went down into the basement and found some awful acrylic in black and hot pink. She dug out a pattern from the mid-80s and started knitting.

Needless to say it came out huge. When I was visiting my sister I decided to use steeks to make it fit her, since it was so big that she couldn’t even fit it under her winter coat. I used a black, storebought cardigan of my sister’s to compare. I soon found out that the back was four inches too big. Each front was two inches too wide. It’s actually worse than it looks on this picture.

The sleeves were even worse! As in so bad that they actually worked as hats. This picture is taken during art project week in my sister’s school, which is why they are also wearing paint stained aprons on the picture. It’s not a fashion statement, I promise.

And when I had unraveled the seam on the sleeve it was, no kidding, this wide. Anyway, the ending of this story (a happy one, I promise) will come next weekend when my sister comes home and can try on the new version of her cardigan. I didn’t have time to finish it, because I also had to redo the buttonband, since my mom, even tension or not, had placed the buttons with spaces so uneven that I couldn’t stand not fixing it. The space ranged from 4 cm to 11 cm.

This is the last picture, I promise. Me and my aunt Kicki on our last family get-together. People can’t seem to understand why we do so much “hard work” all the time. Knitting is therapy to me, nothing else, and that’s why I keep doing it, even during times when people seem to want me to “relax”. (Yeah, they seem to be bothered, for some reason.) At this point my aunt pulled out her crocheting and kept me company, so ha. There you go.

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