That Laurie’s guest series continues today…

Me? I’m writing and knitting. Hard to tell where I am with the book (somewhere near the end) and I’m on row 6 of the border on the shawl. There are 5 and today is Wednesday. Perhaps I have an issue. I am comforting myself with this video, which has been sent to me by about a million knitters. It’s very good. Over to That Laurie.

Stained Glass Sweater – in which still more experimentation with knitting strips occurs

My next foray into strip knitting originated in the sock yarn dyeing I was doing. To see how those sock yarns in graduated colors were dyeing and spun, see The Wool House Presents series. I was piling up these yarns and decided I should take a stab at making a sweater using them, so I turned to strip knitting again, this time to take advantage of the color changes. (I am not alone in being drawn to this kind of knitting which is also advocated by Anna Zilborg in Knitting for Anarchists, I believe).

However, I still wanted SOME texture, and I saw something like what I was thinking of in a Noro sweater that was hanging up as a demo at Halcyon Yarns. I could not find the pattern (store personnel seemed to think it was in Noro 15, but I did not see it there). Also, to be honest, the cables on that sweater were way too bulky for my taste. Back to the stitch dictionaries! I ultimately chose a version of a shores shoe cable. The panels were 22 stitches wide, with the first and stitches slipped to make seaming easy. All the cables were four-stitch crosses, made so that they made a line toward the center of the panel. This stitch pattern is one of my favorites, the Staghorn Cable (Walker Treasury 1; 251):

Basically I cabled my way to the middle while purling every wrong side row and then started one stitch from the edge once the two “streams” met in the middle. The seaming was more extensive this time, but the cables actually helped me line everything up effectively. Again the underarm section took some finagling (I started in the cable pattern and abandoned it as the sleeve narrowed). As you can tell from the picture below, this version used saddle sections – in the same horseshoe pattern. Perhaps the toughest part was lining the saddles to the main sections, because there were no easy cabled guides and the row and stitch gauges were different. I also worked out a cabley edging for the neck, sleeves and bottom so that it looks like a 2 x 2 cable around the bottom as well. Below you can see the blocked sweater before its final seaming.

Because the sweater has a less tightly entangled cable pattern (so the panels are NOT dense) and the sock yarn weight is closer to sportweight than bulky, this sweater is MUCH lighter. It also allows me to display the yarns I dye rather than walk on them until they develop holes! Here is the final product:

Because of the colors and the panels, I call this one my Stained Glass sweater! And next up – the Arches sweater.