For almost a decade, I’ve been keeping sketchbooks with potential ideas. I have far too many ideas to follow through on any single one as it pops into my brain, so I jot them down and revisit them when I have time. Some get reworked over and over until I get the combination of details just right. Some just need to get out of my brain and onto the page so I can stop thinking about them because they’re not actually good ideas. And some are perfect and just waiting for me to have time for them.
I recently finished a few projects and had the opportunity to pick something out of my sketchbook to work on. I chose this simple cardigan with eyelet details because I wanted to make a DK-weight cardigan, and this was a good match.
I worked up a concept swatch to try out what I originally sketched, but it wasn’t quite right when I knit it up. After trying just the eyelets, my swatch didn’t look right because the stitch to row ratio prevents the eyelets from making something close to a 45 degree angle, and the spacing just looked off. Adding in the slipped stitch lines helped break up the empty space and make the different angles work together better. The larger swatch is my gauge swatch, which I used to calculate the numbers of the new design. I think it will look fairly similar to my rough sketch, but you can judge for yourself when I’ve made more progress!
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