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I wanted to make something nice for my mom for her birthday. I knew it needed to be non-wooly or anything else remotely itchy and it needed to be able to go in the washing machine. I found the Spring Fling pattern on Knitty and decided I could make some adjustments and she would love it. She wears these lacey type cardigans a lot in the summer over a tank top. So I want to my local yarn store in search of the perfect yarn and, boy oh boy, did I find it. Nashua Cilantro is the softest, springiest, non-wooly and machine-washable stuff I could find. I fell in love with the yarn despite my concerns that it might not be quite the right weight called for and so I picked a color I knew she would love and was off.

I knit up a swatch like a good knitter and surprisingly enough had very few gauge issues with this project once I’d knit the swatch and knew my gauge. Problem was, it was significantly off from the pattern. I was getting 4 stitches to an inch instead of 6. I knew smaller needles alone wasn’t going to make up for the difference but I decided, hey, I’m good at math, I can figure this out. There was lots of sketching and dividing and multiplying and going back and forth between the pattern and my notes but I figured it out.

After the gauge change (and resulting mountainload of math), the next big adjustment I made was cutting the ribbing down to just two rows. I decided to make the body a little bit longer and as I got further along I decided to change the neckline too. I made it more of a scoop and less of a V if that makes sense. Believe me, all of this is easier than it sounds once you figure out that a pattern is just a bunch of math.

Next adjustment: the sleeves. I wanted them longer so I made them longer and happily seamed up the whole thing and realized that now that the sleeves were longer, they looked funky without any sort of taper to them. (Okay and one was an inch longer and wider than the other.) So, if my first go at seaming didn’t teach me well enough how it is done, I certainly have it down now after ripping out the seams, frogging the sleeves, doing them over with tapers, then reseaming the whole darned thing. I can seam top edge to top edge. I can seam top edge to side edge. And I can seam side edge to side edge. Also the sleeves came out even the second try.

Sew on a button and voila, Mom’s Birthday Cardigan!