.Fuse.

It’s always nice to find a new way to do things: an interesting pattern, construction, shape or technique. The Fuse cardigan was something like this for me. Something unexpected. I usually know how something is knit just by looking at a photo, but this was constructed a bit differently than I would have thought.

I was a bit too eager to start this project and didn’t read the pattern notes as well as I should have before starting, and missed the bit of knitting the sleeves first. So I started with the body, but that really doesn’t make any difference. I changed to 5.0 mm needles to get the right gauge.

The pattern was written quite concisely and briefly without any further explanations, and there were some things you had to kind of just know or figure out yourself to get right, so I wouldn’t probably recommend this to a beginner. One thing was the short rows: “wrap and turn”. If you have never done short rows before, try to look around the internet for explanations how to do this, as the pattern doesn’t explain it any better than this.

The other thing I could easily have done “wrong” was the joining of sleeves and body. Or not necessarily wrong but it would certainly have been more difficult to continue with the yoke and definitely much more prone to mistakes. As I mentioned I knit the body up to armholes before knitting the sleeves. Actually, on hindsight, it made my life a lot easier. The sleeves are knit in a round so there is no RS or WS to it. The chart has every other row YOs and k2togs and the others just plain knit. However, the body and yoke is knit back and forth so the YOs and k2togs should be on RS and the knit rows become purl rows on WS. Also the YOs alternate so that first you do them at the beginning of the chart and the next time at the end of it. Having done the body first I knew which row I ended up with at the armholes and was able to match the sleeves to the some row of the chart. This made knitting the yoke easier as I didn’t have to remember which row I was on in different parts of the garment, but was knitting the same row of the chart through the whole thing.

Maybe I’m just stupid and this was plain and simple to everyone else, but I’m not sure if I would have realized this if I had done the sleeves first.

Ps. This is one of those knits that should definitely be blocked before use!

I usually have to take at least 10 photos to get one I like (or can live with), as I hate being in front of camera. The rest of the film usually looks something like this. :)