Recently I participated in a knit-a-long of the Soldotna Crop cardigan at my local yarn shop. What a great stashbuster Caitlin Hunter's design is! I used Handmaiden Casbah (blue), (Fibercompany's Road to China and Myak Baby Yak Medium (dark browns), Olann Merino dk (white flecked with pink, blue and brown) and Rowan softyak dk (pink). This top is really versatile because all of us had different figures and different color schemes but we all looked smashing in the sweater!
My friend, Sylvie and I had fun finishing Soldotna at around the same time and then we wore them on our trip together to Yellowstone Park in Montana. The park was gorgeous because of all the late rainfall which had created a bonanza of wildflowers and dramatic waterfalls. I found the Soldotna Crop, with its short sleeves, to be a perfect weight sweater for the kind of alternating warm and cool temperatures at this time of year in Montana. Sylvie and I wore our sweaters from early in the morning at the Paint Pots Geyser basin:
to our late evening dinner at Chico Hot Springs where we indulged in the flaming orange dessert:
The Soldotna is a very short pullover and I lengthened it by following the example on the Malabrigo instagram page of a version lengthened using a repeat from the upper yoke of the sweater.
I really didn’t have the option of making the blue section of the sweater longer as I’d run out of yarn—I tried to knit the sweater almost entirely from stash but the teal section used Handmaiden Casbah doubled to DK weight which almost immediately sold out from the store I’d bought it from so there was no way to extend the main body section. And I found it fun to bring more colorwork to the bottom of the sweater anyway. It is still cropped on me but looks great paired with jeans or a high-waisted skirt.
Here are a few more photos from our trip to Yellowstone:
1: The Paint Pots
2 A Mother Watching over Baby Elk
3. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone Waterfall