Granny Stripes Cardi

I’m using my Mountain Tweed undyed for the main color and then using a whole bunch of MT minis in a variety of colors for the other stripes in the sweater. I think it will be so much fun!

I think this might be turning out a little large, as I feel like maybe I’m a loose crocheter (as well as a knitter!), but I have marked off the area that will be the back, and if the fronts end up being too large to accommodate bands, I may just do a crocheted edging and leave it hang open rather than adding buttons. We’ll see.

9/30 – Hibernating this until after TWT Sweater KAL.

6/29/21 – Pulled this back out since my mom’s here and in the bedroom and I left all of my current projects in there so I need something to work on. I did find a C hook though, so I’ve moved down to that to see if that helps with gauge and size.

2/1/22 – I’ve started working on this again. It’s further along than I thought. Working on the uppers and am almost done. I think? I’m also not sure if I might need to rip back because the armhole depth is seeming like it might be too deep.

11/21/22 – Pulled this back out AGAIN. At this point, I’m ready to just be done with this. I have no idea where I left off on this, but the armholes seemed deep enough so I decided to do a slipped stitch seam across the shoulders and move on to the sleeves. However, once I seamed the shoulders and tried it on, I realized how incredibly SMALL this thing is! ARGH. I have no idea what I did with the sizing on this, especially as it had seemed like it was going to be too large and I have not grown since I started this!

What I am learning though is that crochet fabric does NOT have the kind of give that knit fabric has, and I am not going to be able to block this to improve fit. My best bet at this point is to do the sleeves, then do a button band that goes the whole way around the front and make it big enough that it adds some width to the fronts without looking stupid and then just wear it as an open front cardi. That’s not my favorite kind of cardi, but I refuse to let all of this yarn and work go to waste because I really love the colors and how it looks!

2/3/23 – My current plan to mitigate the disaster that is this sweater is to simply do a single crochet front edging around the whole front opening to add some extra width, at the same edging to the sleeve holes, and wear it as a short-sleeved, open front cardi. I mostly want to be done with it, and I want to be able to use it as a show sample.

2/16 – I did about 2″ of a crochet edging all along the front and neck, and it looks really nice, aside from the fact that the lower corners want to curl, one in and one out. I’m assuming that has something to do with the nature of single crochet fabric that I’m not aware of? I’ll see if blocking helps.

I ended up just picking up the stitches around the armholes and then doing one round of single crochet, doing some decreases right at the very top to try and mitigate the “poinking” of the shoulders and then also at the underarm to try and pull in the excess fabric under there. I’m not sure the decreases were overly helpful in either case, and the tops are still rather poinky, but again I’ll see what blocking does, and then I may try to do some kind of creative inside stitching to get it to do what I want. But you know what? I don’t really care at this point. This is one of those projects that is better done than perfect. It’ll work fine as a show sample for the yarn. The stripes are pretty, if nothing else!