Original Pattern: Campside Cardi 

Knitter Extra Ordinaire: Judith (Ravelry Profile)

Mods: Judith altered the pattern to have no eyelets or textured stitches, and instead worked in stripes. She reduced the increases for the sleeves, as well. Details on her modifications can be found on her project page, here.

What Makes This Awesome: If you read the description of her project, you’ll notice that Judith had a lot of single skeins in different colours, so she decided to overdye all the light colour skeins to get the blue colour, and then worked in the contrasting stripes of the colours that wouldn’t overdye as effectively. What a great idea for using up those random single skeins that seem to naturally build up on your stash! If you have a lot of random skeins that are light coloured -say, light grey or cream, consider over dyeing them with a darker colour to get more of one colour in your stash. I’ve tried this before and was amazed at the results! As long as you do it all in the same batch, your odds of a consistent colourway are high.

I also love how Judith changed out the textured stitches and eyelets for just simple stockinette and stripes. When you are considering purchasing a pattern, it’s worth looking at it with an eye for future modifications – can you add in or subject different elements, like stripes or lace or cables? Can you already envision some modifications, like making it simpler, or making it more dramatic? Those possibilities are always worth thinking about, because when you’ve knit a pattern once, modifying it the second time becomes that much easier!