Mister Rogers cardigan: back and one side done!
Reporting progress on a project that I've learned a lot from so far. I'm making the "Nurture" cardigan from the book "Knitting the Neighborhood," and tonight I finished a front side. I had already done the back. One more side, both sleeves, and a collar remain to be done. This is my first sweater, and my biggest project yet.
It's far from perfect, but it'll be ok. I'm not unhappy enough to do it over again. The curly edges are to be expected and will be fine when I attach the rest of the pieces. Up close, my cable crossovers through a fair amount of it are sloppy, but then I figured out what was going wrong*, and they're great after that. So the cables down the other front and the arms should be great. The sloppiness isn't visible from a normal distance, and I've been assured that will block out.
The one thing I'm really unhappy with is the loose cast on. I'm told it'll be fine when I'm wearing it, but I will probably look online for info on tightening it up anyway, because I'm not going to put a zipper on it, so I don't think it will look good. (I've seen a video about that before, just need to find it again.)
Still, like I said, I'm going to keep going. It'll be ok!
* Here's the trick to my nicer cables, which might be better in a video than written out. I essentially followed these instructions, except that I'm using a flexible loom and the regular knit stitch rather than an e-wrap.
On the row before the crossover, I do a loose double e-wrap on the center two stitches. Loose is important to get the extra tiny bit of space I need and is part of what I was doing wrong earlier, when I was doing fairly tight double wraps.
On the crossover row, I unwrap the extra wrap like in the video, then I also untwist the stitch, since I'm not doing e-wraps on the rest. I was doing that right the whole time, it's just worth calling out because it's different than the video.
After knitting the stitches of the crossover, using the video's instructions, you tighten up the working yarn from all six stitches. On my flexible loom, once I do that, the cable stitches want to pull the loom links into each other. What I was doing wrong was to force them all flat as I knit the next row. That was pulling yarn in from the surrounding stitches, resulting in loose stitches in the cable. You can see them if you zoom in on the picture. Once I figured that out, I switched to just making it somewhat flatter every row, and by the time I was closing in on the next crossover, it would be flat again. I hope that makes sense!