Women's Retro Fair Isle Cardigan in Cascade 220 Sport - DK255

Women's Retro Fair Isle Cardigan in Cascade 220 Sport – DK255 by Melissa Leapman

About This Pattern

This Women's Retro Fair Isle Cardigan (DK255) is a beautifully detailed knitting pattern designed by Melissa Leapman and published by Cascade Yarns. Rated Intermediate in skill level, this pattern delivers a classic, vintage-inspired colorwork cardigan with a rich, multi-hued palette that evokes traditional Fair Isle styling. It is available as a free downloadable PDF, making it an excellent choice for knitters looking to build their stranded colorwork skills without any upfront cost.

What Is Being Made

The finished project is a women's button-front cardigan sweater worked in the Fair Isle tradition, featuring an elaborate stranded colorwork design across the body. The garment is sized to fit a range of figures, with five size options available:

• Sizes: Small, Medium, Large, 1X, and 2X
• Finished Chest (Buttoned): 36.5 (39, 45, 47, 54) inches
• Finished Length: 24.25 (25.5, 26.5, 26.5, 27.25) inches

The cardigan is closed with 8 buttons, giving it a polished, wearable finish suitable for everyday wear or special occasions. The retro aesthetic is achieved through the careful combination of a large, coordinated color palette arranged in repeating geometric and traditional Fair Isle motifs.

Construction Techniques

This pattern uses a combination of classic knitting construction methods that are well-suited to intermediate knitters who want to refine their skills:

• Bottom-Up Construction: The cardigan is worked from the lower edge upward toward the shoulders, which allows knitters to easily adjust length before committing to the upper body shaping.
• Worked Flat: All pieces are knitted flat on straight or circular needles, meaning the knitter works back and forth in rows rather than in the round. This is a traditional approach for cardigans and makes it straightforward to follow colorwork charts row by row.
• Seamed Construction: The individual pieces — typically the back, two fronts, and sleeves — are knitted separately and then sewn together using a yarn needle. Seaming adds structure and stability to the finished garment, which is particularly beneficial for a colorwork piece that may have extra fabric tension from carried yarns.
• Stranded Colorwork (Fair Isle): The defining technique of this cardigan is stranded knitting, in which multiple yarn colors are used across a single row. Unused colors are carried, or "stranded," loosely across the back of the work. This creates the characteristic double-layered fabric associated with Fair Isle knitting, which is both warm and visually striking. Managing float tension is key to keeping the fabric smooth and the stitches even.

Stitches Used

While the full stitch list is detailed within the PDF, patterns of this type by Melissa Leapman typically incorporate the following foundational knitting stitches:

• Knit and Purl stitches — the building blocks of all flat knitting
• Ribbing — commonly used at the cuffs, hem, and button bands for a neat, stretchy edge finish
• Stranded Stockinette — the primary stitch used throughout the colorwork sections, creating a smooth right-side fabric that showcases the Fair Isle motifs clearly

Materials Required

This pattern is specifically written for Cascade Yarns® Cascade 220® Sport, a 100% Peruvian Highland Wool yarn. The Sport weight yarn comes in 50g (1.75 oz) skeins with approximately 165 yards (150 m) per skein, making it ideal for detailed colorwork at a fine gauge. The all-wool fiber content provides excellent stitch definition, good elasticity for stranded knitting, and a beautiful drape suited to a fitted cardigan silhouette.

The palette for this cardigan is notably rich and extensive, using eleven colors in total:

• Color A – #8393 Navy: 3 (4, 4, 4, 5) skeins