Freshly finished…a cardigan for an eight year old friend of ours.  It is my own design that I have named Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside. Ravelled here.

Knitting for children as they get older is a tricky thing.  Some don’t like things around their neck. Some don’t like the heaviness of wool. And then there is the minefield of colour.

This cardigan was designed to be something that could be left at the beach house for rugging up on a windy walk by the sea or as a warm thing over your bathers as evening comes in. I used a variegated yarn to introduce a range of colours that a child could attach themselves to, a nautical stripe and purple marbled buttons that will hopefully seal the deal.

I am proud to say that this all came out of the stash, which is my favourite place for putting together a project. The blue is Heirloom Easy Care 8ply.  I had three balls and needed to buy one extra to finish the button band.  The white is of unknown origin as it came from an oppy with no ball bands but it is a commercial cabled jobbie that is probably machine washable. The variegated yarn is very special and was the nucleus of the whole cardigan.

It is a Jillybean yarn called Tweed Sock in a colourway called Sunrise Tweed.  I bought it on our UK adventure a couple of years ago and had been saving it for something special.  There was 400 m in the skein and I reckon I have got about a third left still. It is a machine washable merino sock yarn in a light sportsweight.  It has combined with the DK in a lovely way, the different yarn weights creating a slight corrugated effect which accentuates the stripes.

Variegated yarns often pool when they have been dyed in short repeats. Whilst I love the colours in variegated yarns, I don’t really like a pooling effect. I reckon striping with contrasting yarns is a way to both highlight the variegation but break up any pooling.

This cardigan was knit in the round with raglan sleeves and steeked fronts.  Steeking is when you cut up the middle of your knitting and bind off the cut stitches securely. Machine washable yarn in not usually recommended for a steeked garment.  The additional processing undergone by the yarn, removes the barbs along the fibre shafts to prevent the fibres from mashing together and felting.  Steeking normally requires fibres that are good at sticking together to provide a secure edge.

I could have just knit back and forth but knitting in the round is so quick and I don’t really have much available knitting time so I really needed a steeking solution that would work for machine washable yarns.

After much thought, I used Tom of Holland’s knotted steek method.  In this method, you unravel the steek stitches…

Then cut them in half, knotting the yarn ends in pairs…

And weave in the ends.

I should have picked up the stitches for the button band prior to weaving in but I forgot and it was a tough job to find the stitches to pick up.

The result is strong and secure but the stripes have been a little distorted by the weaving in of the steek ends.  This wouldn’t be a problem if this was just plain knitting. It is a little bit of an experiment to see if the steek stays secure over time and wearing. I shall have to let you know how it goes.

Fingers crossed our friend likes her cardigan or that their beach house is so cold, she will have to wear it!