DIY: Knit Harvest Cardigan by Robin Melanson

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The Harvest Cardigan by Robin Melanson is a steeked cardigan knit with fair isle colourwork and embellished with embroidery. It also has corrugated ribbing at the hem, cuffs, buttonband, and collar. I love the almost gradient effect of the colours! I’ve wanted to make this cardigan since before I knew how to knit.

The pattern includes seven sizes, from a bust of 33″ to 49.75.” I knit the fifth size, 43.” I even knit a gauge swatch with the main colour to ensure I got a good fit. To get gauge, I used 2.0 mm needles for the ribbing and 2.5 mm needles for the body. The pattern instructs you to size up needles for the body colourwork. However, I used the 2.5 mm needles throughout because I know my stranded knitting gauge is always a bit loose. Unfortunately, I found that my gauge became a bit tighter and the cardigan has negative ease. My row gauge also changed and became tighter so the resulting cardigan is a bit short, especially in the armscye. This makes it perfect for a petite body! Tomiko is modeling it here.

The pattern calls for Jamieson’s of Shetland Shetland Double Knitting, a DK weight wool yarn. For my Harvest Cardigan, the main colour brown yarn is from Rambling Yarns by Linc Farm purchased at the Hamilton Fibre Forge last year. I chose four gorgeous colours of Rowan Felted Tweed for the colourwork.

MC: brown
CC1: Hillside Green (turquoise)
CC2: Avocado (green)
CC3: Cumin (orange)
CC4: Mineral (yellow)

This was the first time I used Rowan Felted Tweed. The colours were beautifully tweedy and created the perfect gradient. The turquoise colour had flecks of orange and green in it. Meanwhile, the orange colour had flecks of turqouise. And the green had flecks of both orange and turqouise.

According to other project notes, I made a few alterations. I moved the BOR to centre front instead of under the left armpit. This let me keep the yarn ends at centre front where the steek is. I also made 5 steek stitches instead of 3, to give me more room to sew and cut the steek later on. Additionally, I knit several rows at the bottom of the cardigan, between the corrugated ribbing and the beginning of the waist shaping. I found the waist decreases to be very abrupt and created a weird flare around the hip, probably due to my tighter row gauge. But since this was at the beginning of the sweater, I didn’t really notice it until I was almost done the stranded colourwork of the body.

For the first time, I purled all the steek stitches instead of knitting them in an alternating fair isle stitch pattern. Doing so allowed the steeked edge to curl underneath the knitting and create a natural facing for the buttonband.

I’ve knit cardigans with a steek down the centre front before, but I’ve never knit one with steeked armholes! They let you knit the colourwork in the round all the way up to the neck. However, this results in not being able to try on the cardigan until you sew the steeks and cut them open. Even though I used woolly, toothy yarns, I reinforced my steeks with my sewing machine with a short stitch length.

Robin Melanson states that the cover of Neil Young’s 1972 album Harvest and wild grasses inspired her in choosing her colour palette. The designer shaded the fair isle colourss rhythmically from dark to light then back to dark on a neutral brown background. I found this to be the perfect pattern in which to use my naturally brown farm yarn from Linc Farm.

After, I reinforced my steeks with two lines of machine sewing, I then picked up stitches for the buttonbands and neckband. I added extra rows of corrugated ribbing to the buttonband and neckband to add a bit more width to the cardigan. I knit the mirror-image gradient from turquoise to yellow and back.

See my other steeked cardigans here:

• Foxglove Cardigan by Kate Davies Designs
• Palmetto Cardigan by Emilia Jensen

Get the Harvest Cardigan pattern here.