Into the big frog pond

Once upon a time there was this glorious pattern. This magical pattern was a Cardigan. Yes, with a capital C, because it was glorious. It has a princess fit which I already knew looked good on me and  it had intricate cables running along the front and the backside, and I could just imagine it in green. A Irish knit cardigan and I lusted about it.

Best thing was that it was a free pattern from Drops Design.

So I waited till you could buy the magazine and I bought the yarn. Well, a bit more then the pattern said I needed, because I wasn't a fool.  Or so I thought...

I decided that I was going to knit it in the round and steek it afterward. I just found 40 cm long dpn's and I couldn't wait to try this mystical "knitting the sweaters" thing in the round out.  I patiently swatched and calculated what I needed for my size. I started with my cardigan in November 2012.

The problems started when I decided that I didn't want a garter bottom. Instead of riping out what I already had on the needles I dropped stitches and made it into a short ripped edge. This dropping of the stitched went alright, but the end result was not tidy and at the time I decided it looked alright. But ofcourse it wasn't...

I don't know what I do but apparently I don't knit as tight ands neat when I  k2,p2. This is probably the reason why any sane knitter uses smaller needles when she ribs. *facepalm*  Anyway, as you can tell from the picture I got really far. 

Somewhere in January the next year I started with the sleeves. In all my "wisdom" I decided I wanted for the cable to run along the sleeve instead of  what the pattern called for. And I wanted to do all this in the round instead of flat as the pattern called for. In my first attempt somehow there got to be ladders in between the dpn's in the reverse stockinette.

Not being shy of frogging I ripped back and started again and then I started to look at the body again and found mistakes with the crossing of cabled and so I frogged that back too, since just dropping the stitches didn't work sadly this time.

With good cheer I continued knitting everything ones more, how ever mistakes just kept popping up. In September that year I really stood back and took a good look at what I had to show for all my curses and sweat.  I once more had to rip back, because I had increased too much for the bust. (wishful thinking? ) And finally my logical thinking set in. There is about 10 cm difference between my left and my right arm. There was no way that I was going to have a neat joining  in the pattern of the arms and the body, if the sleeves were going to be knit from the bottom up.

This let to more curses and despair. And the cardigan, my beautiful Irish green dream cardigan vanished into area 51 in my home. (So named because of many UFO's there. Un Finished Objects)

This week I finally got the courage to maybe give the cardigan a new chance. I ripped out the sleeves I had and the proceded to try my hand at some sweater surgery. I snipped one stitch, and tried to rip out the bottom to hopefully reknit the thing as I wished it. What I didn't took in account was the cabling. I got hopefully stuck in a tangle.

That's when the whole thing took a  one way trip to the frog pond. No princesses with golden balls lingered there. No magical transformed frog prince. For your information...

Just green woolen balls. And a lot of tears....