Vest of Frustration

This vest has been started and stopped a few times. A friend gave me some delightful malabrigo with the one caveat that I actually use it, and not just let it wither away in my stash. Since she gifted me with three skeins, I figured I'd try it as a vest. However, I wasn't happy with most of the vest patterns that I could find. I wanted a deep scoop or v-neck in a worsted weight yarn. (Crisp was very close to what I was looking for, but in sport weight. And while I do love Wendy's patterns and advice, there is no way that I was going to pay for a pattern and then basically have to rewrite it.) I cast on for something of my own, but quickly realized I wasn't talented enough/was too lazy to do the math to make the neck look incredible.

Then, along came Bramblewood.

I love cables, and the scoop was just the right depth. I started the 33" on size 6s, and then realized that it was not going to work out for me. The gauge was making my hand hurt on 6s, so I moved up to 7s, but the size I was making was not going to be big enough for me in the shoulders. I also wasn't crazy about the way the cable pattern kind of blended into the rest of the stockinette. (If you look, when the cables are the furthest out, it makes it smooth between the rest of the stockinette body.) As I needed the needles for something out, I put the project in time out for about a month and moved on.

Lately, I've been kind of a knitting fiend. I seem to be happiest when I have a sweater-ish project and a sock project on the needles, so I decided to restart this (on size 7s, knitting the 36" size) on Wednesday. I did add an extra purl stitch to the cable pattern to keep it from flowing into the stockinette, and I'm really pleased with how it's looking. Once I joined in the round, I did find that the yarn has a slight tendency to pool, so I'm alternating skeins, and I am loving the striping effect that I'm getting. It is coming along quite nicely, and I'll hopefully have enough yarn to finish this either this weekend or early next week. The good news is that there's minimal finishing, so I won't have any reason not to have a smart fall vest soon.