My father’s mother is the great craftswoman of our family. Knitting, needlepoint, sewing, rugs, interior design…she’s done it all in her day. She’ll be 90 years old in February. Everything she made is distinguished by her particular imagination and sense of humor – she loves wildlife and always wanted to make a rug with wild turkey tracks across it, for example. Among her finest creations is an enormous rug she designed and stitched over several years before I was born. It’s an inventive pattern of geometric ornament, fantastic creatures, and symbols of the family. It paints a picture of our family over the past four or five generations, including references to my mother and my aunt, who had recently married my grandmother’s sons when she made the rug.

All this was in the back of my mind when I set out to design a sweater for my father. I decided I’d select motifs that remind me of him and speak to the themes of his life. In the center panels, place, the island where he’s made our family home: ripple stitch for the sea, a single variation on Christmas Trees for the forested landscape and for his own woodland knowledge and woodworker’s craft, and raindrops for the Pacific Northwest. Gull stitch cables flanking the center panel. Then a ladder motif, because I needed a horizontal element, but also representative of his carpentry. Finally, for his Scottish heritage, a Scotch faggoting cable (a beautiful little openwork cable I unearthed in my Barbara Walker treasury, and I can trust knitters not to snigger about the faggoting, eh?), a column of willow buds for his spring birthday, and seed stitch around the armholes.

I charted all this out the weekend before last, and I’m happy to report no major bugs in my work in the first 25 rows. I worked the sweater in the round up to the arm holes, and now I’ve divided for the front and back. I’m also happy to report that working a pattern like this is a lot of fun. It’s giving me confidence that I’ll be able to carry off the Aran sweater my husband says he wants…but that’s a project for next year. The yarn, Jaeger luxury tweed, is a marled merino/alpaca blend that makes a nice soft fabric. The alpaca leaves a halo and the construction of the yarn – a fawn strand and a moss strand twisted together – isn’t ideal for showing off this kind of stitch work. The overall effect is more subtle than usual for a gansey, but then my dad is a pretty subtle guy. The sweater was bound to be non-traditional from the beginning, as he wanted a medium-weight sweater. I’d originally intended to use Blackwater Abbey Aran weight wool, but that would have produced a heavy sweater Dad could only wear on the coldest days in our mild climate.

Pictures to come when I’ve worked some more rows, and I’m still deciding about the design for the upper sleeves!