The embroidery club started up today. I had considered continuing with some of the ideas from an embroidery course I did a year ago, or maybe with one of the printed fabrics from the workshop this spring, but I haven’t had time to look at what I have or what I want to do. Instead I picked something where I could just get going.

This brown cardigan is great but also not. It fits me well, the yarn is soft and warm, the colour is nice, the knitting is tidy. But: I made it an awkward length that I’m not happy with. It is unflattering on me, and I find it more and more difficult to ignore that. I already have a relatively long torso and shortish lower body; a too-long cardigan emphasises that even more. And the bottom hem hits right where I am broadest, which makes me look even more unproportional.

The way it’s constructed, I can’t just unravel the bottom and make it shorter. The next best thing is to redesign it to make it look shorter, by breaking up the long vertical with something horizontal, and to draw the attention away from the hips to the waist. Hence, a discretely colourful waistband.