One of my goals for this year was to use up the rest of the stash yarn I got when I was birthday yarn-bombed. I weighed the yarn, estimated the yardage (no ball band, so I'm not 100% sure what it is besides worsted acrylic), and decided there was enough there for something for Niece the Elder. She's 5 and likes anything "rainbow", so I knitted up a square and showed it to her. She said she Yes! she liked it, and Yes! she would like me to make something for Yule for her with it. I showed her a picture of the Flower Cardigan that J-A recommended to me, and Yes! Niece the Elder liked that too.
I must have caught her in a good mood. Still, I have buy-in for the present, and that's important. I don't like to work for hours and hours on something and then spring it on someone without being very certain they will like it.
The cardigan starts in the centre of that flower motif you can see in the photo above, and then expands from that point to create a raglan, cutaway cardigan. I don't have buttons for it yet, but here's the front:
This took me almost exactly two weeks to knit. Most of the discussion on Ravelry has praised the directions. Personally I found them a little overwritten, but that's the trend these days. I skipped some sections and just did what I thought made sense, and 90% of the time that's what the directions said to do anyhow — when they didn't, such as the button band/lower border rib, you can't tell I altered anything. The biggest alteration was that I was using worsted weight instead of the stipulated DK, so I made a size 4 in order to get size 6 results. I just followed the size 4 stitch counts and the size 6 measurements, and it all worked out.
There's an adult version available, which will be tempting to do at some point.
Best of all, it used up almost all the yarn!