How do you knit a cardigan in a day? By making it really really small.
My housekeeper has a five-year-old stepdaughter. I had a 60 year-old dollhouse that my dad had built me when I was well, about five years old. We decided the two had to meet, so I gave her my dollhouse.
My dad built this dollhouse from scratch when I was just a little girl, and I have kept it through multiple moves over the years. At one point I did a little work on it and built some furniture from kits to go in it, but I just didn’t really have the time or the inclination to do it justice, and it’s been sitting in my attic for far too long. So I asked my housekeeper if she thought her stepdaughter would be interested and she was!
She immediately painted it yellow (coincidentally, my house - also a Cape Cod - is yellow), and started working on the inside. After just about a week, she had the living room just about finished. There’s vinyl flooring, a tiled surround on the fireplace, she put in the windows I bought years ago, but never installed, even baseboard molding, with crown molding to come. I want to knit a Blanket to drape over the back of the couch, using leftover silk lace yarn I used to knit her wedding shawl.
She mentioned wanting to make some sort of jacket to hang on a hook in the entryway, where she currently has just a bench. She’ll probably install lighting there like she did in the living room and maybe put some boots next to the bench. So I said I would knit her a sweater to hang on the hooks. Now, I have 40+ bins of yarn in my stash scattered on various bookshelves in my house. (I needed to use those bookshelves for something after I got rid of all of my books as I went to audiobooks and e-books.) I was able to direct her right to the bin that I knew had some lace weight alpaca yarn. She picked her color and we were good to go.
My plan was to knit the two fronts and the back of the cardigan in one piece, leaving the arm holes open, and then pick up stitches around the arm holes for the sleeves. Then I could just sew one seam along the top of each sleeve and connect the fronts to the back at the shoulder.
I ended up having to do the sleeves twice, since I made them too small in the first place. I was doing all of my math in my head using a 1/12 scale conversion to make it fit the scale of the house. So that means what would normally be about a 2 foot long grandpa sweater, ended up being 2 inches long and cuffs that would be 9” circumference in real life are less than 3/4”. But the good news is sleeves don’t take long to knit when they’re about a dozen stitches across and maybe 15 or 16 rows long.
Unfortunately, when you knit something this small, gravity doesn’t do the heavy lifting on getting the draping right. Since this is supposed to hang on a hook, it didn’t look right with the arms sticking straight out as they do in the top picture. So I dampened the whole thing, and then sort of squished it into a drapery shape and let it dry. That way I think it will end up looking lovely in that entryway.
If I made another one, I would probably start at the bottom back, knit up to the shoulders, split for the fronts. Then I would pick up just a few stitches along the shoulder, and fudge some short rows to start the sleeve cap, so that the sleeves would naturally hang down rather than out when it was done.
But for about a day's worth of work, I’m pretty happy with the outcome.
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