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!

Temperature: 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind: 13 mph east-northeast. Precipitation: Heavy mist and light rain (mizzle, we call it in the Northwest). English weather. Pacific Northwest weather. And today, New York weather. Perfect conditions to debut Lightning, really. And she deserves a more interesting backdrop than the patio, so an excursion to Central Park was in order. (Warning: light levels were so low, even in the middle of the day, that these photos may show up very dark in IE. End plug for Firefox.)

All photos by my handsome husband, who deserves special thanks for working in such miserable weather without even a long-sleeved shirt.

Project notes:

Lightning, from the Rowan Plaid collection by Kim Hargreaves. I used 7 and a half balls of Rowan Plaid in the color “lavender mist” and knit the smaller of the two sizes. When I cast on for this sweater last winter, it was going to be my second adult sweater: I was so enchanted by the pretty scalloped edging that I disregarded the “most difficult” pattern rating completely. Lightning kept me on my toes, and there was much frogging, but she taught me a great deal. I learned about slanting increases and decreases and the way they shape a design. I learned double decreases, three-needle bind off, and how to read a chart. Most importantly, I learned to read my knitting rather than the chart. And so I can heartily recommend this to new knitters: don’t be afraid to tackle something that looks too difficult. Bring your patience, embrace the Frog, and don’t hesitate to ask for help, but if you keep your wits about you you’ll learn more than you ever could with safe, easy projects. It’s been a year now since I finished that first scarf, and all the real progress I’ve made has come when I’ve set my sights on patterns like this one. End sermon.

I probably didn’t need to lengthen the sleeves, but it’s nice to be able to tuck your fingers up inside if you aren’t wearing gloves. The only other modification I made was to stitch the fold in the shawl collar in place at the front edges to counteract a bit of floppiness and encourage the proper shape. I attached the collar by picking up stitches along the neckline and along the cast-on edge of the collar and then using a three-needle bind off. It looks a little tidier from the inside, which is likely to be exposed because the sweater has no closure system apart from the belt. I’m thinking of adding a single hook-and-eye at the base of the collar, as it does gap open a bit. But all in all, I deem this project a success, and I’m glad to have her finished at last!

Lightning, she is done. Photo shoot tk when I can get myself, the husband, and the camera all together in some natural light!

What with the holiday and a lovely knitterly afternoon at Lisa’s apartment yesterday, I was able to finish up Lightning’s primary body parts and toss her in a lavender Eucalan bath this morning. Here’s the cat examining my blocking job:

I forgot how Rowan Plaid grooooowwws when it’s wet – that’s alpaca for you! So I patted it back into shape and left it moisten the couch all day. Then I started on the collar, which I hope to finish tonight. Lightning doesn’t make anything easy, so I’ve had to do considerable frogging on each piece. Just when I think I’ve got her figured out (and I can “read” the pattern in the knitting perfectly at this point), she hexes me with mysteriously incorrect stitch counts. I have to go back and add in extra-pattern increases or decreases any time there’s shaping, and count each row as I go along. So she’s been a loooong time in the knitting – you’ve seen her lurking there at the top of the list of projects on the needles for the last ten months, after all! But the end is in sight, and I plan to have her ready for Rhinebeck next weekend. (Whether or not it’ll be cold enough for bulky weight alpaca blend sweaters is another issue, of course.)

So what’s next? I spent a good few hours this afternoon working out the pattern for my father’s Christmas gansey. (And by the way, some of the Spiders told me they had no idea what I meant by a gansey: it’s traditionally a seaman’s pullover sweater that originated on the Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, hence the name. It has patterning – cables, raised stitch patterns, etc. – over the chest and upper arms.) I still have a couple more inches of dull-as-dirt stockinette-in-the-round before I get to begin…Garter Welts, Ripple Stitch, Christmas Trees, Raindrops, Gull Stitch, Willow Buds, Twisted Tree, and Scotch Faggoting Cable(!). Don’t it have a kind of poetry to it? It was a hoot poring over Barbara Walker’s First Treasury of Knitting Patterns to choose the different elements, and then arranging them so that the stitch counts would work together properly. I tried to select patterns that remind me of something about my dad, and it’s going to be an engaging puzzle trying to put them all on one chart.

I have further design inspirations, too. I’m not going to share them just yet, but this beautiful Rowan yarn I got from Amanda at our impromptu yarn swap is fuel for the fire: