On Thursday I gave my latest knitting project its first public airing… I present the Geography Cardigan! I got the idea from an old 80’s knitting book Mrs Morris (the shop owner) lent me as a joke. The tackiness of the patterns really needs to be seen to be believed. (The back cover, for instance, features a guy in suspenders and a bow-tie standing next to a woman wearing a sweater… with knitted suspender and bow-tie motifs. Get it? It’s an OPTICAL ILLUSION. Very clever.) Anyway, I was flipping through it and suddenly there he was: Sexy Geography Teacher. He had a Ewan McGregor ‘tache to go with his acid-wash jeans and the grooviest, daggiest cardigan I’d ever seen. I had to make one. After a period of trial and error I settled on Sirdar Nova as the yarn of choice. It’s not 100% wool, but it’s soft and it was the only thing thick enough to get gauge that had a range of bright colors. In terms of technical difficulty, it was my first ever attempt at intarsia and I bungled it a bit. It looks fine from the outside, but I made the mistake of occasionally carrying the wool across the back instead of cutting and starting a new strand (because it was only a gap of a few stitches, and I’m lazy). I’ve since found out that you NEVER MIX INTARSIA AND FAIRISLE, which is what I was doing. Consider yourself warned. Anyhoo, I also had to invent a way to knit the collar on to the garment since the one knitted to the pattern specifications was way, way too small. But it worked out. I’m actually pretty proud of it! I still need to head to Newtown for some appropriate buttons, but it’s definitely one of my more successful projects. And check out the back! (And as the Aussies keep asking, Australia’s on my left elbow. No, I wasn’t clever enough to do the thing where you reorient the whole world to put Australia on top. Sorry.)