I’ve finally reached the armscye bindoff row on both sleeves of the cabled sweater I’m currently knitting for my partner. The body pieces are finished, so once these sleeve caps are complete it’s just assembly and neck band left to do. This sweater has raglan shaping with a pseudo-saddle shoulder so the rows will get much shorter much faster from here on.
This is the third such sweater I’ve made him, all reverse engineered from his favourite store bought sweater which is all stretched out and shredding apart. The first two, one in a heathered blue and one in brown, were faithful reproductions of that allover cabled sweater. This one has exactly the same basic framework but with a different set of cables, including a central front and back panel of the cable I drafted in 2005, taken from an illustrated page in the Book of Kells, for my first published sweater design at Knitty Magazine (link: Mariah Cardigan).
All three of these have been knit in Wool of the Andes from Knit Picks, which holds up very well to heavy cables yet is a nice discount yarn. We’ve already got enough for a fourth, having lucked into 20 balls of the same yarn in a small town thrift store a while back. It’s a dusty rose colour right now so I’m going to be throwing swatches into all of my dye baths for a while until we find an overdye combination we like, hopefully resulting in a good red, orange, or burgundy shade.
I’ve been out of the knitwear design game for a long time now, not really having been all that good at it, but I’m considering writing up the pattern for this and sharing it here for free, in this one size with notes on scaling up or down.