More of the Right Front (and another boring blog post title)

I'm now more than halfway to the armhole shaping for the right front of the Wrap Cardi from Vogue Holiday 2006. I would love to make it past the armholes today, but I don't know if I'll have that much knitting time.

A commenter last time I showed this sweater asked if it was a difficult sweater. She was apparently a newer knitter and was thinking about knitting it, but what with all my moaning and groaning was questioning whether or not this was an easy project. The answer is that no, it's not a difficult sweater design. It's pretty much stockinette stitch and the back and sleeves (even though I haven't knit the sleeves yet) are straightforward and easy. The part that has me moaning and groaning are the fronts. If you look at the picture above, you can see that the first half of the right front is worked on large needles with two strands of yarn. Then, halfway across, you drop one strand and switch to smaller needles. Theoretically, this isn't a big deal, but with the needle changing you have to be sure to keep your tension where you change or you'll have a big, honking, ladder gap there. Also, "drop one strand" sounds easy, but for some reason that eludes me (alright, I just don't care quite enough to figure it out) after working the doubled yarn section, the strands of yarn are nicely wrapped around each other. So I have to unwind the balls of yarn every time I "drop one strand." Not quite so much of the dropping going on. Finally, I have a notoriously short attention span and I like to knit both fronts of cardis and both sleeves at the same time on the same needle. That way my tension is the same for both, the shaping is identical, I don't have to keep meticulous notes, and when I'm done, I'm done. I can do the sleeves this way, but the fronts would probably have killed me - two different sizes of needles and 4 balls of yarn and the yarn getting twisted around itself like it had been played with by a kitten on speed just makes me queasy to think about.

So basically what I'm saying is no, this is not a hard pattern to do. It is fiddly for the fronts, but if you love the design and have the intestinal fortitude to plow through the fiddliness, it's very doable. Does this help?