Iris Cardigan - by Marie Amelie Designs
I love Marie Amelie patterns, they are beautiful and fun to knit, but I hate that I always have to drastically alter them to fit me. I have no idea why this is because I meet gauge and follow her patterns as written (they are very well written, especially for someone who’s native language is not English) and yet the sweaters always turn out huge on me. Luckily, I now realize this and just do a lot of math to figure out how to get it to fit me and luckily, they also do after a lot of modifications.
I went through a brioche phase last fall and this cardigan had been one that I had been eyeing for awhile, but it always looked so complicated, so I put off knitting it. I took the plunge in October and it really was a joy to knit. The brioche although looks complicated was not at all. I did have to frog the yoke once or twice for stupid mistakes but nothing too terrible. The hard part was figuring out how to do all the modifications to not only make it fit me properly but also to be able to steek it because as you all know I hate purling.
Modifications:
Body: As I have mentioned before all of Marie’s patterns turn out way too big for me even when knitting the smallest size so I have to make some major modifications to get it fit me properly. For this cardigan I knit the smallest size which is meant to fit a 31” bust, my bust is 34” so one would think it would be too small, but oh no it fits me with room to spare. Although when you look at the gauge and do the math in theory it should all work out, but for some reason it just doesn’t. On average after separating the sleeves from the body I normally have between 200-220 stitches, but with this pattern the size 34” has over 240 which is nuts. The size 31” has around 220 which is on the large end so I had to decrease even more to get a stitch count of 199 which created about 2”of positive ease making this cardigan about 36” bust. In order to decrease to get to 199 stitches when separating for the sleeves and the body I followed the directions for the size 31” but used size 34” sleeves which nicely decreased my overall stitch count. I thought that I would need the larger sleeves but turns out I didn’t they were also way too big, and I had to do some major modifications there too.
Sleeves: To make the sleeves fit I only picked up the number of stitches I had cast on when separating for the body, I did not pick up any extra. I also immediately started decreasing and decreased 2 stitches every row for the first 5 rows. I then started decreasing every 8 rows a total of 4 times and then every 10 rows a total of 6 times for a total of 10 decreases. I should have just decreased every 10 rows from the beginning, but I was worried they would be too lose and I hate a lose sleeve. I also don’t my sleeves being too tight which is why I switched to every 10 rows halfway through.
Steeking: The steeking turned out to be pretty easy this time, now that I have done it a few times. I cast on 5 stitches after the neckband because I like the steek to lay flat and I feel like it does that easier I start the steek after the neckband ribbing. I reinforced it by using a crochet reinforcement and a machine sewn reinforcement. I had never done a machine sewn reinforcement before but thought I would give it a try because I was being lazy and didn’t want to hand sew one it. It worked perfectly and I love how it turned out. I like having a pop of color for my steek, so I used the contrast color for the crochet reinforcement and it turned out nicely. I was going to sew a ribbon over the steek but after seeing how it looked on one side, I decided I liked it better without it.
