Wise Ones, I need your best recommendations for knitting argyle in the round. First: possible? Or possible but such a colossal headache that I’d be mad to attempt it?

My brother has finally produced the measurements of his ideal sweater. (Get this: the sleeves are 21.5″ from underarm to cuff. And 14″ maximum circumference. The body is 39″ around. My brother is 6’4″ and had to buy a mannequin-size suit for his wedding.) That means that as soon as I’m done with Mr. G’s sweater (will the blocking cure all? stay tuned! Aran-weight wool takes an age to dry!), I get to cast on for the Argyle of Insanity. (Cue dizzying footage of a knitter in black scaling a sheer drop hand over hand up a rope, knitting needles clenched in her teeth.) I may have mentioned here at some point that my brother, when offered the sweater of his dreams as a Christmas gift last year, knew exactly what he wanted: “An argyle sweater! Except I’ve never seen one that’s really what I want. I think the lines are too straight.”

Bafflement ensued, at least at my end. The lines are too straight? Argyles are built of diamond shapes, in my experience. Diamonds have, well, straight lines. So I applied my 27 years of knowledge of my brother’s mind and tastes to the interpretation. This is a kid who came home from the second grade and announced that there were too many Tylers and henceforth he’d prefer to go by his rare middle name. (We obliged. Saxton, the name of a great-great uncle notable for having pin-cushioned several continents’ worth of fearsome beasties with his homemade longbow and arrows, suits him much better.) I decided he wasn’t after beer-goggles argyle with wavy lines so much as an argyle that would break the traditional rigid grid. A sort of deconstructed argyle. Then I remembered a vest our grandmother made for our grandfather—two winters’ work from 1969 to 1971, according to the dates she embroidered on the left shoulder. It’s done in needlepoint and is one of the finest examples of her powerful and original design sense. Dad wears it for Christmas and other dressy occasions now.

Those swirls of geometric shapes (they’re tiny log cabin squares!) made me think of a sort of spiraling flock of small argyle diamonds, shifting color and flying free at the edges. Here’s a sketch of how I imagine they’ll whirl around the body:

Now, to me, this is a construction that begs to be knit in the round. I don’t want a seam up the middle of my skein of diamonds. I could knit it flat in one piece with the seam at the left side, but I’d really like to knit the plain sleeves in the round and then set them in according to Elizabeth Zimmermann’s instructions, as I did for Daisy Daisy. And if the argyle is to travel all the way up and peep over the left shoulder, I’d still have to shift into the round at the sleeve join.

So I really need to know how to work intarsia in the round. I’ve heard about people doing it. Is it feasible here, where I’ve got such small areas of colorwork? What are the best references to go to for learning the technique? I’m not opposed to knitting back backwards, a skill I think I remember being involved. I’d still need a little separate bobbin of the background color for in between the diamonds, right? Has anyone tried this, and was it worthwhile? Can I see pictures of your work on Ravelry or Flickr? And isn’t there a way to do it with short rows? Am I going to need to knit a pair of argyle socks in the round to practice? (Come on, twist my arm! I seem to remember there was a class on this at Madrona last year… anyone remember who taught it?)

Oh, and in case you’re curious, here are the colors of Berroco Ultra Alpaca DK I’ll be using:

Let the madness begin.

Here’s what I packaged up to send to Iraq. What you can’t see underneath is a bunch of knitting needles in sizes I had duplicated, several yards of cotton and flannel fabrics, a case of sewing threads and needles, a cloth tape measure, a box of pins, etc. I was going to mail it yesterday, but my husband reminded me an APO package of this weight has to go to the counter, and our post office doesn’t have counter hours on the weekend. So the dear man is going to mail it for me first thing on Tuesday.

We’re having a quiet long weekend here, except that my parents have come to visit with their 10-month-old Labrador so there’s a good deal of enthusiastic dog wrestling with a soundtrack like feeding time in the bear pit. The weather has been wetter and windier than we’ve had in a long time. I’m organizing the Woolery, vowing not to buy yarn for a long while, watching the Vuelta a España, drinking tea, and trying to finish Mr. G’s new sweater. (One sleeve to go, plus a bit of surgery to lengthen the body by an inch or two–Meg Swansen’s trick of casting on a sweater body provisionally so you can check the size once it’s assembled and then knit down to the hem would have served me well here.) There’s been some light cookery as well. Here’s a picture for John, who told me he likes the vegetable posts:

Last night’s dinner was artichokes with lemon butter, roasted Brussels sprouts with butter and fresh sage, and sautéed rock fish for them as eats it. All locally grown, and the fish caught by Mr. G or one of his relations a few weeks ago on a deep sea fishing excursion. (Photography by my dad; food styling by my mom. Tea towel with embroidered owls a birthday gift from Marika.)

After spending July fussing over details and intricacies and sheer frippery in my knitting, I came home from New York wanting a project that wouldn’t require a lick of forethought, measuring, or planning… an avenue for my fingers to take over and let the piece just form itself with very little input from my brain. I wanted to freewheel for a little while. And I had just the thing in my suitcase.

I bought no yarn while I was Back East, but I did nip into Purl Patchwork. Ostensibly I was there to grab a wee giftie for my mother-in-law in thanks for puppy care while we were out of town, but naturally I couldn’t resist a little birthday present to myself. (How often does a girl turn 30, after all? You can still think of yourself as a girl after you’re 30, right?) I spent a long while sorting through all the tidy little fat quarter bundles looking for colors that reminded me of Alice, and along the way I set aside about five of them that were calling my name. They were all similar: quiet neutrals with just a shot of something brighter. I finally picked a favorite, and my heart was already hanging out a seductive vision of what it would become: a simple log cabin baby blanket with brights from my scrap bag for the “hearths.” With a hot and sticky weekend to myself when I arrived home, I quickly set to work.

I didn’t measure. I cut with scissors, willy-nilly, and didn’t even try very hard to make my strips straight. I cut each one plumper or skinnier on whim. If the squares came out a little cock-eyed, I smiled. And soon I had six. They were more or less equal in size; I added a little extra strip to a couple of them when I realized their neighbors would easily square up to 12″. Then I did pull out the rotary cutter to true them up. A nice woman at Bolt helped me find the perfect sashing, and two more evenings of sewing brought me here:

A quilt top! I just need to procure some flannel for the batting (I want this to be a very lightweight quilt, good for summer, easy to fold up and pack anywhere) and I’ll be ready to make the sandwich. It’s small enough I think I may be able to do some simple machine quilting myself. I’m thinking of eight-point stars radiating from the “hearths” out to the edges of the squares, and if you’ve got suggestions for the borders I’d like to hear them. My trusty little Husqvarna Emerald (she’s called Signy) doesn’t have any special features for quilting, but I don’t see any reason she can’t stitch some basic shapes through three layers of fabric.

The overall result isn’t nearly so quiet as I imagined it would be when I looked at that tidy little stack of beigey fabrics. It has gumption and unexpected vigor. Because I like to name things, I’m calling this quilt Satsuki, after the elder girl in Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro,” which remains near the top of my list of favorite movies. I don’t speak Japanese and don’t like to trust the Internet for these things, but what I’ve found is that Satsuki is a traditional name for the month of May and means (depending how you write it) something like “blooming moon” or “happiness/rare/hope.” I like that. I want all that for the baby this quilt will warm.

This is my third year of crazy knitting during the Tour de France, and it seems I’m getting the hang of it. This is the first year I’ve actually underreached and not had to grit my teeth and knit like George Hincapie riding a time trial with a broken collarbone to finish my project. I’m late on the wrap-up because I took a little vacation to visit my family and other beloved people in the Northeast, but I did manage to press my husband into service for a quick photo shoot while we were waiting for a train in Reading, Massachusetts. So here’s Daisy Daisy!

Note to self: Good idea to take pictures after a transcontinental red-eye, eh, genius? Despite the fact that I look like yesterday’s toast crusts, I love this little jacket. The improvised back shaping and the set-in seamless sleeves worked out perfectly. The yarn is lovely to wear, and I’m just not bothering myself about the really obvious color change at the shoulders. I did decide the bicycle wheel/flower design on the front needed a little more punch, so while I was frittering away a couple of hours in the Long Beach airport yesterday afternoon, I revised it comme ça:

Just doubling the outer rim gave it the extra weight I wanted. All this embellishment is just me drawing loops of yarn through the fabric with a crochet hook and binding them off, by the way. I think that’s probably obvious, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’m capable of anything fancier than that when it comes to surface design. As you can see, just making a straight line stretches me somewhat. Oh, and the sweater closes with an i-cord button loop:

When all’s said and done, I needed more than 5 and a half skeins of the Louet MerLin Worsted, about 860 yards. I have learned respect for the appetite of the daisy stitch and its relatives.

If people are interested in a pattern, I am willing to work on one, but I have to tell you I’m nervous as a cat about trying to size this thing properly for anyone who isn’t built with proportions similar to mine. It would be really straightforward if it weren’t for the back shaping, which, as you can see, turned out very fitted. If your curves are closer together, you’d have to space the decreases and increases more closely from bottom to top. If they’re shallow, you’d want less shaping. If you don’t really have curves or just favor boxier silhouettes, you could scrap the shaping entirely. The beauty of knitting is that, with practice, we can learn to easily tailor designs to our own bodies, and I’d really want to encourage that for anyone knitting Daisy Daisy, but I know many aren’t comfortable working outside a pattern and as a designer who aims to please I cringe at the thought of someone following what I did and then finding it doesn’t fit her at all. I think if I do write this up it will have to be á la Zimmermann, asking knitters to do a bit of calculating to find their own best fit.

But hey! A sweater in three weeks! Let’s stop with the designer’s insecurities and open a bottle of Hendrick’s in celebration! Because it’s hot here in Portland. Apparently I missed the worst of it, but I still bought a cucumber at the farmers’ market this morning with an afternoon G&T in mind. I think it’ll go well with the sewing activity I have planned. (More on that later.)