Lilac pink book club cardigan

Here's the sweater I knitted so hard that I sproinged my shoulder blade! It's been finished for a couple of weeks, but I finally got Wax to take some pictures of it on me in natural light.

It's good that I hurried when knitting, actually (even if it isn't good that my shoulder is wonky), because I think it's going to be too warm to wear it out more until next fall. I got a few weeks of wear out of it when it was new this way.



This sweater was knitted using the popular Finnish knitwear designer Sari Nordlund's Bookclub cardigan pattern in Filcolana Peruvian aran-weight wool in color 227 ("old rose", but it's more a bright pastel lilac, I'd say). (I made a number of modifications and notes which can be seen on my project page.)

I love this sweater. It has an unusual shape and drape caused by the unusual construction with the Scandinavian-style shoulder, where the shoulder seams are moved onto the back and the fronts curve over the shoulders to meet them, and I love the shape of the front V-neck.

It isn't perfect because the pockets aren't deep enough to carry my phone in - which I knew was happening when I knitted it, but I didn't want to lengthen the bottom hem to make the phone fit or go back and move the pocket openings higher up. Also the sleeves are slightly too long. You never know for sure how much they will grow with blocking, and having them slightly too short is worse.

Some more passages from William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains

‘For the day is waxing old, and here meseemeth in this dim hall there are words crossing in the air about us—words spoken in days long ago, and tales of old time, that keep egging me on to do my will and die, because that is all that the world hath for a valiant man; and to such words I would not hearken, for in this hour I have no will to die, nor can I think of death.’

‘Now, lads, the night weareth and the guest is weary: therefore whoso of you hath in him any minstrelsy, now let him make it, for later on it shall be over-late.’

‘Now were I fain to have a true tale out of him, but it is little likely that anything shall come of my much questioning; and it is ill forcing a young man to tell lies.’

He laughed and said: ‘Thou didst not doubt but that if we met, thou mightest do with me as thou wouldest?’

‘So it is,’ she said, ‘that I doubted it little.’

[T]he stony neck sank into another desolate miry heath still falling toward the east, but whose further side was walled by a rampart of crags cleft at their tops into marvellous-shapes, coal-black, ungrassed and unmossed. Thitherward the hound led straight, and Gold-mane followed wondering: as he drew near them he saw that they were not very high, the tallest peak scant fifty feet from the face of the heath.

They made their way through the scattered rocks at the foot of these crags, till, just where the rock-wall seemed the closest, the way through the stones turned into a path going through it skew-wise; and it was now so clear a path that belike it had been bettered by men’s hands. Down thereby Face-of-god followed the hound, deeming that he was come to the gates of the Shadowy Vale, and the path went down steeply and swiftly.