Tea Leaves Cardigan

This, my people, is a finished Tea Leaves Cardigan:



And here is the back:



I'm very happy with it, although the going was rocky there for a while. And despite the fact that I finished it immediately before the weather broke and probably won't be able to wear it for a while.

There are a bunch of notes on my project page, so I don't want to repeat myself too much, but I would like to reaffirm how much I love Twisted. It is spongy and soft - not aggressively soft, just passively soft - and very warm. This sweater, despite not even closing down most of the front, actually makes me noticeably warmer. I suspect Twisted would make a lovely blanket yarn for this reason.

I frogged Wicked and meant to steam the skeined yarn to get some of the kinks out, but then I didn't get around to it before it was time to cast on. The resulting fabric was nubbly and wonky, which I hoped would come out in the blocking. I'd wet-blocked Wicked, so I'd been expecting the yarn not to bloom or expand as much the second time around. Well, the wet-blocking totally took care of the nubbliness, but it also made the whole thing much, much bigger. I could have dealt with it being a little bit bigger, but it was more like this-is-a-disaster bigger. So I laid out the sweater as neatly as I could, then came back around three or four more times in the first two hours of drying to try to scrunch it down to be shorter and narrower. That actually worked, pretty much. It didn't grow once it dried and I put it on.



I did end up frogging back to the last ruffle and eliminating the last two (I think) sets of increases. Before blocking, this resulted in the ruffled yoke kind of sticking out strangely from the body. I thought about frogging back to the collar and doing all of the yoke increases more gradually, but then I decided to press on and hope it came out in the blocking, and it totally did.

Overall I'm really happy with the sweater. If I ever make it again, I'll definitely make and wet-block a gauge swatch, and then plan the yoke increases accordingly. I also knit a couple extra rows on the front button bands because I wanted them to be a bit wider, and I like how that came out. And I used three buttons instead of two, as I think the pattern calls for.