... of the knitting bag.

Ok, so I don't have a knitting bag, but it's better than the random places I stash projects that I'm neglecting. Even if it's technically more accurate. We're doing some repair on the house and I was forced to move the sweater I'm about to show you from the shelf I had been stashing it on.

(We have really old carpeting in our office that we should have taken up when we got the house, but we didn't and it's just been icky.) Long story short, I pulled out this sweater.

I started knitting it in June so that I'd have a stranded project to work on at Knitting Camp. And when at camp, I got the notion to--without reading the pattern--use a yoke style construction to get set-in sleeves. Which would have been fine, except that I'm very intent upon knitting sleeves from the shoulder down for a number of reasons cheifly:

  1. Progress is more apparent near the end rather than the beginning.
  2. It's easier to get sleeves to be the right length and shape when you're working top down.
  3. It's easier to have a nicer shoulder seem when knitting top down.

While the third point is obviated by the fact that you have to knit down from a provisional cast on (and there is thus a half stitch discrepancy in the pattern). I've compensated a bit for this, and it's working out.

The problem? My usual speed of decreasing developed for drop shouldered sweaters, isn't quite right. So I've had to rip the sleeve out twice. The third time is the charm.

The patterns for this sweater is from the book of Anatolian Stocking Designs. The central motif says something about "Egyptian Motif," I think, and the other other is something that I tweaked a lot. The little round motif is a modified Fair Isle perrie that I've used a couple of times.

Here's a closeup of the pattern. This is sort of draft two of this pattern. The first, is in the bottom of the box of sweaters that I took to camp with me. I did it in Prime Alpaca Sport Weight. It's a very nice sweater, but it's not particularly wearable: too warm and the fabric is kind of limp. Also, I'm used to knitting stranded work pretty tight to keep the wind out, and so this sweater which the rest of the world thinks is sport weight, I treated like jumper weight shetland. I'd like to make another garment out of it at some point, but I'd need to be a little less automatic about the gauge of that.

Here's a detail of the neck shaping, which uses this slit neck shape that I'm quite fond of. This shape is often the difference between a sweater that's too warm and a sweater that's just right. And while I'm not particularly sensitive to wool (like I can wear sweaters over short sleeve shirts, Having the wool on my neck is often too much.)

So there's that. I should go back to knitting or something.