Tweedy Love

I finished the Central Park Hoodie, and I’m in love. There’s a good reason why this is the most popular cardigan on Ravelry. It’s simple and fairly easy, but detailed enough to keep it interesting. A great classic look. I’d love to make this again sometime, but with a collar instead of a hood.

Pattern: Central Park Hoodie Ravelry link here.
Yarn: Tahki Donegal Tweed Homespun; color 854; 7 skeins
Size: 36″, with modifications (finished size about 37″)
Needles: US 7 (4.5mm) and US 5 (3.75 mm)

Modifications: (This looks like a lot, but other than the sleeve size, the modifications I did were very minor.)

• Added one extra stitch on each side of the side seams since I’d heard some people say the pattern ran small, but that wasn’t necessary – the body would have blocked perfectly to size. I’m not sure why other people had problems. I wouldn’t bother with this change next time.
• Increased body length by an inch to 15″ since I’m tall.
• Grafted the hood instead of binding off and seaming (I’d definitely do that again), then picked up the stitches for the entire front band at once. I might consider making the hood less pointy, but I’ll almost never wear the hood up anyway, so it doesn’t matter too much.
• Bound off the stitches at the neck and then picked up stitches for the hood, rather than keeping the stitches on waste yarn. I thought this would give a bit more structure to the neck area. Some people are doing a line of crochet to stabilze the neckline, but this worked fine for me.
• Used the sleeve instructions for the 40″ size (but keeping the length for the size 36″) and reshaped the sleeve cap accordingly. I knitted the sleeves in the round to make sure the fit was going to be right. A lot of people said the sleeves were very tight. I think they’d probably have been fine using the original directions if I were making a cardigan that would only go over sleeveless, short-sleeved, or thin long-sleeved tops, but I wanted to make sure it would be comfortable to wear over my medium-weight turtlenecks. If I knitted this again, I’d knit the sleeves flat, and choose the sleeve size based on what I planned to wear it over. But you need to pay attention to the cast-on numbers for the different sizes – for some sizes, going up to the next size doesn’t change the number of stitches cast-on, only the number of increases (so the sleeve is only larger at the upper arm, not from the wrist to elbow).
• Added toggle-buttons and button loops. I really liked the toggles with this yarn, since it’s kind of rustic. I crocheted loops for the toggles after deciding on the toggles and where to place them – I’ll detail that modification tomorrow.

One thing I’d do if I made it again would be to add some waist shaping. I decided against that for this one, because I planned on it being “outerwear”, and didn’t want it to be too fitted. But I think a bit of waist shaping would have worked nicely without making it too snug.