Remember the ever-so popular two-tone shrug from Fitted Knits by Stefanie Japel? It seemed like everyone was knitting one in 2008. Even I started one! I began this my freshman year of college, and I decided to modify mine to have full length sleeves. I only had two sweaters under my belt at the time, and I had no idea how much yarn longer sleeves would take so I bought an extra skein of yarn just to be safe. Thankfully this was just after I started buying higher quality yarn, and I ended up buying four skeins of Cascade 220. I had 880 skeins of yarn, but I did all of these odd things like bundling up the extra length of my long tail cast on (that tail was excessively long) in case I ran out of yarn. It’s a bit silly in retrospect.
I knit all of the body and left the sleeves live, with the yarn still attached, just in case I didn’t have enough of the contrast color (I was really worried about running out of yarn for some reason), and I had started the ribbing when I started to get annoyed with the project. Worsted weight yarn on 3.75mm needles just wasn’t comfortable for me to knit at the time, and when I got to the first set of increases for the ribbing, I had just about had enough. I knew I would never wear this shrug. I didn’t own anything that would go with it at the time; none of my older dresses work with these colors. It seemed ridiculous to spend so much time on a project that I never would wear so I put this in a gallon ziplock bag, stuffed it away, and moved on to new things.
When I was moving into my current place, I decided it was time to go through my stash, and I found this lurking at the bottom. I could remember how much yarn I had bought, and I realized that, while I had bought an excessive amount for a shrug, it was the perfect quantity for a cropped sweater! I snapped these pictures, and then I frogged this bad boy! I’m going to knit a sweater that has similar shaping to Chuck but with simultaneous set in sleeves instead of short row set in sleeves.
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