My aunt gave me the wool for this cardigan in December 2011, and it's only reached wearable state now -- knitted projects are slow. Especially when you decide to make things as complicated as possible by adding in lots of colours and patterns, and fiddling around with the shape...

This is the pattern I used; from Noro Love Pattern Collection by Jane Ellison. But I'm as incapable of following a knitting pattern as I am a recipe, so made lots of changes. The half length sleeves definitely had to go, as did the knobbly stitch pattern, the breast pockets, and the round neck -- I improvised a v-neck instead.

The wool is brilliant -- it has a self striping effect you can see in its unaltered state on the back of the cardigan. Because the front pieces are half as wide, though, the colour gradation is longer, and I didn't want the long murky brown patches to dominate. It was already a bit of a nightmare trying to get both front pieces to match, because each ball of wool starts at a different part of the colour cycle - I ended up with lots of small balls to get the transitions in the right places. Adding freestyle knitted in fair-isle patterns in other colours made things even more complicated, so that the cardigan spent a lot of its life in bits, in bags of tangling, unravelling balls of wool. 

But worth the wait I think!

The red roses were vaguely inspired by my favourite knitwear designer, Kaffe Fassett's persian poppy design -- I'm working up to a full Kaffe-style all over pattern for my next project, even if it will mean carrying round an Old Sheep Shop's worth of tiny balls of wool.

I feel especially proud of the pockets, which were a lot easier than I'd feared, and ended up slotting neatly into the design. The wooden buttons felt right for the homespun aesthetic I was going for -- each was sewn on with a different shade.