Yarn Along - Wildflowers Cardigan

Greetings! Obviously one of favorite things is reading, but I also quite love knitting. Ginny over at Small Things hosts a lovely little link-up so once you're done here go visit and see what everyone else is up to.

Here we are, week 1 of my Wildflowers cardigan. Karen, Jaimie, Therese, Lorene, and I are finally on our way to making this lovely cardigan from Coastal Knits. We started choosing yarns and swatching for gauge back in December, shortly before Christmas. We gave our gauge swatches to dear Karen who kindly helped us figure out what size needles and what size of the pattern we would need to work to achieve our desired size cardigan. Then we met up last Friday night to cast on and get to work. 

I cheated a little by casting on some of my 222 stitches the night before (in my defense, I can't count worth anything so I knew I'd need to count and count and count again once I'd cast on), and I also started knitting one of my pocket linings. The others got their stitches cast on and we began working on the edge since the sweater is bottom-up. 

Someday I'll take better photos

The edging. Oh my goodness. It's one of those things where you have to count very carefully and put your wine down and focus and shush the people around you. It's not difficult but it required a great deal of focus. It also required me to completely rip out what I'd done and start over.

We met up on Saturday afternoon to finish the edging (which I'd caught up to that morning), put in a lifeline, and confirm our meeting schedule. We intend to be finished by April 30th. I've got a lot more knitting to do...

This is what 31 finished rows looks like. 123 rows to go...

The yarn is a new line my LYS is carrying: Berroco's Folio is a DK/sport weight yarn that's baby alpaca and rayon and while it's working up a little fuzzier than I'd really like, it feels good running through my fingers, isn't too splitty, and looks like it will have gorgeous drape when I'm done. I'll let you know in April if it was worth the money.

So last week I talked about Thrift Books and how much I love them, right? Well three more books in the Ranger's Apprentice series came yesterday so I spent more of my evening reading instead of knitting. I finished The Sorcerer of the North in a little less than 3 hours. This was partly because I'd read it before, and partly because it's not a very long book. Then I started reading The Siege of Macindaw but forced myself to quit after about 13 chapters because I had a headache and was very sleepy. I need to come up with a system that allows me to read a chapter for every 4 or 5 rows I knit, otherwise I won't finish my cardigan or my reading list.

The first three in the series - gorgeous hardcovers!

If you want to know what else I've got on my needles, head on over to my Ravelry page for a look-see.

That's it for me today.  What have you been knitting and reading lately? Let me know in comments and then head over to Ginny's to see what everyone else is up to!

Love, 

Willow

*Author's Note: The Yarn Along button in this post is property of Ginny Sheller and is used with permission. All other images used in this post as well as text are (c)Whitney Miller and may be used only with my express permission. See my About Page for details.*