knitting a fall wardrobe – alpenglühen cardigan

Feels good to be back here! I’ve been working on my Alpenglühen cardigan for so long, I began to doubt I would ever finish it.
But, 7 months after the first stitch, here it is:

The yarn is Cascade 220 in the colorway Bright Red. I wanted a cheery but warm red (cool colors make my skin look even paler) and I remember agonizing over just the right shade of red for days, scouring Ravelry and pictures of different yarns and reds. In the end I ordered the Cascade yarn from France as it wasn’t available in this specific colorway in Germany.

Cables are actually fun to knit and they look much more complicated on a finished garment than they are to make!
Why did this cardigan take me so long?
For one thing, I am finding out more and more that I don’t enjoy working bottom up on cardigans. Top-down knitting is so much more motivating because the garment takes shape more quickly and you can try it on in between. Once I did get to the shoulder part I hated the many many wrap and turns the pattern called for and if you looked closely you could see I didn’t manage them very well. It was just not a fun project to work on and I would not knit this particular pattern again. Not because it’s a bad pattern (it’s wonderful, really) but because it just wasn’t for me.

The finished cardigan however? Simply gorgeous! Love the fit, love the cables, love the color to bits! I will be wanting to wear this every day once the weather gets cooler!

For those of you wondering where I’ve been in the past few weeks: I went to Scotland in July (to be blogged soon!) and had to take a spontaneous break in all things internet and social media due to some personal changes afterwards. All good though and one thing I can share is that we’ve just bought a house!
We’re super happy since demand for houses in our area is huge and prices are skyrocketing. We’ve been very lucky to find an affordable house we liked AND get it too (thanks to our super quick financial advisor who managed to secure a written statement from the bank that they would finance us within two hours!). We’ll get the keys to our snug and small terraced house in December and will be in before Christmas after some renovation and redecorating.
The last few weeks have been stressful since everything happened so fast and there were many many appointments we needed to fit in around our daily work schedules and many many things we needed to wrap our heads around when it came to financing it all. I’d never taken out a loan or been in debt before in my entire life and here I went getting myself a mortgage I’ll be paying off until I reach pension age! Scary, admittedly!
Now I’m looking forward to the more fun aspect of house buying – planning the rooms and the changes we’ll make. I’ll even have a small garden to plan for next year 🙂

On another note: I don’t usually comment on political stuff on here but Germany seems to get a lot of international attention these days for how we handle the refugee crisis. The amount of help people are offering and organising really is astonishing and heartwarming! I even have trouble finding a place to drop off donations these days since all storage spaces are full. Yes, some people are negative and scared here too but the overwhelming public feeling is one of empathy and welcoming. A proud time to be German and we Germans sure don’t say that lightly!