A Good Cardigan Pattern Is Hard To Find

I’ve spent hours and hours trying to find just the right cardigan pattern to use with some hand painted yarn I purchased recently.  Carol Wolf’s patterns are some of my favorites.  She always seems to design garments that are practical as well as beautiful.  The key to the simple but elegant stitch pattern she has used in creating this pretty Alder Buckthorn Cardigan is to anchor each row with a single crochet at its beginning and end.  Sounds simple, but using that simple single crochet solves several problems.  First, it stabilizes each row, creating a stronger fabric.  Second, it makes joining and edging much easier since there are no irregularities in the height of stitches.  Since this stitch pattern is a rather simple repeat of single and double crochets – each single is worked in the top of a double and each double is worked into the top of a single – the addition of the independent single crochets at the beginning and end of each row creates a consistently sized stitch to work into.  The only other way to accomplish that is to crochet your garment in a single stitch – and even then, one side of the stitch doesn’t look like the other side of the stitch.  I find that a bit daunting when I’m trying to edge an item.

Carol has a lot of well designed garments available on her site – and her patterns are free!  She’s her own harshest critic and blatantly posts corrections on the rare occasion when she finds them.  Her garments are simple in design, but are all elegant in appearance.  I’m sure you’ll become a fan of her work as much as I am.

To go directly to the pattern for the Alder Buckthorn Cardigan, click here.  To see Carol’s other garments and her other free patterns, you can visit her blog here and take a good look around.  Carol’s Palm Beach Shrug is next up on my To-Do List.

Need Crochet supplies and Yarn? We highly recommend Lionbrand for quality yarn and ongoing yarn sales and discounts. Make sure to check out their free crochet patterns too.

Check out these Cardigan Crochet Pattern Books and these Crochet cardigan patterns we found on Etsy.

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