Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Dusting Off a Dusty Rose Sweater

 


In 2018, I knitted myself a cardigan from some dusty rose worsted I had on hand in what was supposed to be a size 40 but was actually much smaller than that. I never wore it because it was just too snug on me to be wearable. The gauge wasn't what it should have been, and the front was smaller than the back, sigh. I toyed with the idea of fixing the cardigan for some years, and ultimately decided to take it apart and knit a completely different sweater, as I've realized that I don't like cardigans that much. I had not only the yarn from the cardigan but also 98 grams of the old rose yarn left in my stash, so I need have no worries about running out of yarn. I searched Ravelry for a suitable pullover pattern.

 

 

 

 

 

The pattern I settled on was Mrs. Grimmet's Pullover, designed by Carol Sunday. It looked to me like a very satisfyingly comfortable and good-looking sweater, the kind of thing one can throw on for either downtime at home or for running errands or a trip to the park. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The finished pullover, which I knitted in a size 39 in March 2025. It turned out smaller than I would have liked (I notice that other Ravelry users who have made this sweater complained about it turning out to be smaller than what they were aiming for), but while it's not the relaxed fit I had wanted, it's still a good fit. 

The most memorable thing about this project for me is that it introduced (and converted) me to the sewn bind-off technique. For some years, I'd been using the "yarn over" stretchy bind-off technique, in which one wraps the yarn around the knitting needle before each stitch. The resulting bind off did create a very stretchy edge, but I was never really happy with it because it looked so untidy. For this project I tried out the sewn bind-off technique, and was immediately sold on it. It's just as stretchy as the yarn over method, and it looks so nice and neat. I've used it on nearly every knitting project I've done since. 

This project used all the yarn I was able to salvage when I took apart the cardigan (there were some scraps of yarn that had to go in the garbage), and also 22 grams of my stash old rose worsted, so that's a net stash decrease of 22 grams for this project.