In hell, there’s a spot where you have to photograph reddish hues for the rest of eternity, I’m sure. It’s probably on the seventh circle or something.

We tried taking pictures of this cardigan three times, with two different cameras. It was insane. Either it was too pale, or it was bright red, or it was some variation of orange (and it’s the same if you just look at it in different lighting conditions). I did think I had bought a pale orange yarn, or “melon” as Wolle Rödel calls it, but now I’m not so sure anymore. Which colour is it, really? Is it colour? Is it one colour? Is it legion? Hell if I know!

In the end, I decided to use the picture where I didn’t look like a bug had just scrolled up my nose (a rare occurrence anyway – my face is a free spirit, it does what it wants!) regardless of colour. That doesn’t mean I don’t like this cardigan! I think it’s hella cute, in fact. The pattern has been wasting away in my Ravelry queue since 2009; I never gave it a second look until I got it into my head that I needed a light orange/salmon coloured cardigan. Excuse me, “melon”.

The pattern is supposed to be knitted in separate pieces, but I decided to knit it in the round like my Effie. Of course, Effie is knit in stockinette stitch while Hey Teach! has a lace section … I didn’t manage to adapt the lace pattern for knitting in the round, so there’s a bit of an awkward section at the sides right underneath the armpit where the lace gets interrupted by knit stitches (which originally would have been at the edges of the pattern pieces). You can’t even see them unless I’d raise my arms to cheer or wave, and such exhausting expressions of emotion are usually alien to me anyway. 😉

Apart from this little mishap, Hey Teach! was a quick and fun knit. For some reason it ended up visibly shorter than in the original, even though I tested gauge and measured everything twice. Maybe the model in the original has a shorter torso than mine?

I absolutely LOVE the lacy diamond stitch, by the way. It’s fairly easy to knit without being boring and has stunning results. I was disappointed when I was done with all the lace section because I wanted to knit more and more diamonds!

The yarn, though of ambiguous colour, contributes a lot to the beautiful end result. It has such a crisp, clear stitch definition! I think this is the first cotton yarn that I’d recommend unreservedly. It doesn’t pill like Wolle Rödel Cotton Universal. It isn’t weird to touch and knit with like Wolle Rödel Mille Fili. I just unabashedly like it. After I finished the cardigan, I immediately looked up other projects for the other colour variations of this yarn. (I wonder if they, too, are multiple colours in one.)

Pattern: Hey Teach! by Hélène Rush, size M

Yarn: Cotton Summer by Wolle Rödel (100% cotton), #05 melone