A Sad Tale of Woe

or....that seriously didn't just happen, did it? It's been over a month & I've just gotten to the point that I can talk about this. At the beginning of October I cast on for the Featherweight Cardigan. I knit it in black Malabrigo lace weight. Just to get this straight, that is a full grown, not so small woman sized sweater knit in lace weight yarn. That's itty bitty yarn for those of you who don't know. Black is also notoriously the hardest to work with because it's really difficult to see & read your stitches. I honestly didn't know what the big deal with the black yarn was until I knit this sweater, then I totally got it.

I am in a group on Ravelry that challenges you to finish projects in a certain time frame & I entered this project into that challenge. One of my worst qualities as a knitter is that if I get bored I often stop knitting on that project & it goes into that graveyard I showed you a few weeks ago. I figured this was a perfect candidate for that fate because the knitting was totally boring & there was A LOT of it. I was really proud of myself because I pushed through so that I could finish in time & I only knitted on this thing off & on for 2 months. I took a terrible cell phone photo to prove I finished it for my challenge:


I know that picture is crappy, but it was perfect. Classic. Black. Boring. I could see myself grabbing it up on my way out the door many, many days. It was literally the first sweater that I put on after I was done & immediately loved it. I usually am so sick of looking at a sweater that I made that it takes me until the next season to really like it.

It really did need to be washed & blocked to some extent so I put it to the side to do that whenever I got around to it.

Fast forward a few weeks as I'm packing for Christmas. I was doing laundry & needed my black pants, a black sweater, etc etc. So I went around the house & gathered all of the blacks clothes that needed to be washed....do you see where this is going? After the washer stopped I was pulling clothes out to put them in the dryer & my hand hit....my featherweight sweater. I knew it the second I touched it but I couldn't believe it was true. I pulled it out & kept trying to get my brain to register what I had just done. no.no.no.no.no.no.no.no.no.no. Oh yeah. I did wash it in cold water but with all of the other clothes in there, it just wasn't good. I put it on thinking maybe it wasn't that bad. Patrick said it now looked like a stripper sweater. The fronts shrunk quite a bit in width & the length, which I had made purposely longer but was still a little too short, shrunk bunches. I know directions for felting claim that you need heat AND friction, but I'm here to tell you that in this case friction was all it took. I knew the whole time I was knitting it that if I made a mistake there was no way to tear it out because this yarn REALLY likes itself. When I was picking up the stitches for the button band it had kind of felted together a little & I had to pull it apart. So it didn't take much for it to felt I guess.

This all happened 2 days before I left for the holidays & vacation, so I honestly haven't looked at the damage at any length. It's just....too painful. I loved it & I want another one, but it's going to have to wait until I can bear to think about it. Even though I loved the fabric the Malabrigo made (not to mention how reasonably priced it was), I think it's too prone to felting for me to do it in that yarn again back to back. Maybe a silk blend or something.

May this be a lesson to you all so you don't have to go through that!