Little Red Sweater

In a past post, I shared about a lovely little shrug that I designed. But you know what? Sometimes I knit lovely things and they just don't work with my lifestyle. Luckily, I'm a hand knitter with a passion for designing things that work for me (sorry if you aren't me and my designs don't work for you, I may be willing to dive into your life and design based on you, so email me and we could see if that could work out for both of us). So that's what happened with my Little Red Hooded Shrug, I changed it.

I decided to add the waist portion of the sweater to it. The process itself was much like picking up the button band on a traditional cardigan. I used the same ratios one would use in that situation, except I picked up along the bottom edge of the cardigan. Then I knit for what seemed like ever (some of that was because I was doing this while 9 months pregnant and as you can see in my non-pregnant body it goes really low onto my hips).

The trickiest part of this add-on was the border, which I just incorporated into the long bit of knitting on the edges. It was strange only because the beginning of the row required me to read the chart in one direction and the end of the row required me to reverse it (only now am I realizing that I could have just drawn up a second chart...)

This process has me thinking about looking through shrug patterns on Ravelry instead of just cardigan patterns. I tend to look for inspiration when I want to just knit or try out a new silhouette or technique, but I do limit myself to cardigans. Perhaps there are some lovely shrugs out in the world that could just use a little more length to them for my tastes.

Do you find patterns you love that need just a little tweak to make them more wearable?