Crocheted Garment Adventures

Hi, my name is Michelle and I’m excited to join the talented bloggers here on the Bernat blog! My grandmother taught me to crochet when I was 8 years old – some of my early projects were an outfit for Barbie, an orange & brown granny square baby blanket for my baby cousin (hey, it was the 70’s), and one enormous variegated pink glove that never had a mate.

My intention for this blog is to focus on crocheted garments. I have three crocheted sweaters under my belt – one of which is totally wearable, the other two, well… this is going to be a learning experience for us all. On occasion, my confidence exceeds my abilities – and the laws of physics – but I’m a big fan of making things work and not aiming for perfection as long as I’ve learned something along the way. I hope you will be inspired to add more crocheted garments to your closet too.

For each garment I crochet, I’ll discuss the major changes I make to the pattern, why, and what I think the risks or benefits might be. As I complete each garment, I’ll sum up what I learned and hopefully we’ll all be a little smarter the next time out. I am also going to do a lot of swatches because I don’t need to add any more sweaters to the “what was she thinking” shelf in my closet.

My first garment is the Flower Cardigan from the Bernat free pattern library. I’m changing a few things with this, but I’ll discuss color first. Off the bat, I chose a darker body color – Plum Mist Heather – and lighter contrast colors – Fern & Soft Fern. The colors go together beautifully! I made two swatches – one with the simple stitch pattern of half double crochets and a second swatch that mimics the stripe.

While I was playing around with these swatches, I decided a dark sweater with a light colored 2+ inch horizontal stripe at the bottom seemed to focus a lot of busy-ness around the hip area. Since I’m petite, I decided this would break up the visual a little too much, so I am eliminating one of the three groupings of horizontal striping around the body of the sweater and then will only add a single grouping of that same stripe around the cuffs. I think this is a fairly low risk change since I plan to follow the pattern as written – which begins at the bottom striped area of the body. I will simply switch permanently to the main color a few rows early.

Next week I will discuss my attempts at changing some of the major construction components of this pattern. Wish me luck!

-MichelleCrochets