I don’t normally participate in Crazy for Ewe’s First Friday knit alongs. Partly it’s my contrarian spirit that doesn’t want to make what everyone else is making, and partly it’s that I’m usually more interested in the projects I already have going. But when Ellen posted the March project, the Iced cardigan, I was immediately drawn to the pattern and started thinking about possible yarns.

Of course, I can only conform so far. Instead of using the cotton yarn the shop recommended, I decided to use this lovely blue Kathmandu tweed. Even though the yarn is mostly wool, it knits loosely enough on size 11 needles to make the cardigan suitable for spring and fall. I loved the idea of adding a little color at the collar by striping a variegated yarn with the tweed, so after conferring with the Wednesday night knitters I settled on this colorway of Noro Kochoran, which has a blue fairly close to the Kathmandu along with yellow (not a color I usually wear), red, and green in muted tones. Kochoran has angora in it, which adds a nice fluffy touch at the neck.

I am totally in love with the result. When I started the collar I was a little skeptical about the choice of Noro colorway, but by the time I was halfway through, I knew I had a winner. I wanted the inside of the collar to match the outside, so I knit three rows in each color to put both solid color and mixed color garter ridges on both sides of the fabric. Given how subtle the difference between the two yarns is, this may have been overkill, but I like the way it turned out--even with all the extra ends to weave in. To help keep the front bands from sagging, I only picked up two out of every three side stitches and I switched down to a 10.75 needle.

The one problem I had with the collar is that the short rows gave too much bulk at the back of the neck. It may be that the larger sizes have a thick enough collar band to make these extra rows unnecessary, but whatever it was the unsightly bulge had to go. So I performed a bit of nerve-wracking surgery to excise almost all of the short rows and graft the scruff of the neck back together. The patient survived, and the back of the collar is much improved. If I knit this again, I would either make the cast on at the neck much looser and use an even smaller needle for the short rows or just skip the short rows altogether.

The last thing I had to do was find the perfect buttons. I decided to search on Etsy and settled on these lovely oak wedges from The Hickory Tree. After an agonizing week of watching the package tracking data, they arrived and I finished up the sweater.

Not counting the buttons, button loops, and snaps, I knit this in seven days, which is my current sweater speed record. It helped that I got a bad cold the weekend after I began and wasn’t good for anything more strenuous than knitting.