"I flied?"

Pattern?  Eeek.  No pattern really for the Bluesey sweater, I winged it,  but I do believe , to quote Petrie from 'the Land before Time" ,  I flied.

I think it was happenstance and karma and one or two extraordinarily lucky choices that made it all come together so well. Lucky choice one is the yarn, Artesanal from Aslan Trends.  Lucky choice two, that I wasn't afraid to knit and reknit when I wasn't happy with something. 

I'm very glad I choose the simultaneous set in sleeves and that going with the much smaller needles to do the collar and front bands worked the first time. My favourite part and best lucky choice was that working off the live stitches on the back of the neck worked out so very very well.  

The basic sweater was knit to fit from Barbara Walker's Knitting From the Top Down, to fit my rather narrow shoulders and my not narrow hips. At the underarm, in my gauge (about 4.5 stitches to an inch, ) I knit to fit, with no ease, 44 inches.  With the button band, that gives a finished measurement of about 48 inches at the underarm.  It has two sets of short rows at the bust line. They are separated by 2 rows of plain knitting to fit my rather blousey frontage.  (This was the choice I made that I feared might make it fail.  I worried that there would be too much extra length in the front, but nope, worked well.)  Increases to accommodate the rather large hips happened at 5 row intervals at what would normally be the underarm seams.  No other shaping was done.  

Otherwise, it is a basic 3/4 sleeve v neck cardigan with a rather nifty front band.  The front band is picked up at a ratio of 3 stitches for every 4 rows on a 3.5 mm needle. Across the back of the neck I used the live stitches.   I picked up the row, purled back and then knit 1 more rows in stockinette.  Then I knit 5 rows of reverse stockinette (or maybe 6), 2 rows of stockinette, 5 or 6 rows of reverse stockinette, and finished off with 5 rows of stockinette and bound off on the purl side, to give the edge a nice roll. I think. 

The bands roots are in a common traditional gansey welting of narrow bands of stockinette interspersed by wider bands of reverse stockinette and knitting the number of rows that looked right.

If I had not done the knit to fit thing, but wanted the look, I would use a good fitting basic cardigan pattern, give it a soft v-neck, and knit the nifty front band following proportions rather than number of rows.    

    

I hope these notes make sense. But that is what I did.  I think.  Sort of.