It fits. The sleeves are a bit narrow and will be revised before I offer this pattern, but it works for Mr. G. We will have a proper photo shoot this weekend if time and lighting allow, but this little hint shows off the bits I’m most proud of anyway. See the shoulder gussets that allow a comfortable fit around the neck without having to slope the back or front at the shoulders? This unusual feature is what attracted me to the sweater in this historical photograph from Gladys Thompson’s excellent Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys & Arans:

Tempting as it is, I probably won’t require my beloved to don a sou’wester
and smoke a pipe for the official photoshoot.

Nor am I certain my considerable attraction to him could sustain a gnarly neck beard,
so we won’t be going for that authentic touch, either.

I love this book for its treasury of sweater designs and careful attention to the differences from one little cove’s worth of knitters to the next, and also for its photographs of crusty old fisherman. This is only one of the fabulous portraits it offers, although Gladys writes that it’s her favorite. I couldn’t tell, though, what might happen at the back of that particular old sweater, so I had to devise a way to raise the neckline at the back, as you see above.

See, too, how the maple leaves are changing. A last gasp of summer came through in the guise of a blustery hot wind that littered the sidewalk with roughly four thousand treacherous gum nuts from the hundred-year-old trees in front of our house, so it’s officially raking season. I’d like to pretend there’s another month to go before we really reach leaf fall, but I fear for the neighbors’ ankles. Our sweet gums are fine handsome old trees, but they are more accomplished than any other tree at protracting the drop of their pretty, star-shaped leaves over many months and then continuing to bombard unsuspecting passers-by with their spiky seed pods even after the leaves are gone. This year I see they are celebrating their centennial by growing a number of large clusters of conjoined pods, like gum nut rat kings, which will prove especially uncomfortable if they drop on people’s heads. You may wish to wear an old-timey felt hat for protection if you’re strolling in the neighborhood… fair warning. Luckily, I own several. I may need to knit a few more.

Thank you all for the excellent resources on intarsia in the round that flooded the comments! Special appreciation to Rodger, who tipped me off to an excellent book that was already right under my nose. I took Priscilla Gibson-Roberts to bed (um, you know what I mean) that very night to read up. I have begun a swatchcap to practice my Invisible Join 1. (I tried Invisible Join 2 at first, but it quickly got the better of me and left my circular needle locked in a contorted figure 8. I am sure this is my fault and not Priscilla’s, but I was too tired to work out what I’d done wrong.) We’ll evaluate the results together in a couple of days.

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.

No photos yet, because at this point it doesn’t look good enough on my husband. It is snug, and rather short in the torso. I may have grossly underestimated the circumference of my beloved’s manly chest.  And I should have heeded Elizabeth Zimmermann’s wisdom about short rows across the back above the hem. Last night I was all ready to make a decisive surgical snip and tear out a line of stitches so I could lengthen the torso and graft it back together again, but the look on Mr. G’s face stopped me cold. He was horrified that I was about to cut the knitting. I had explained the procedure to him upon our discovery that the sweater was looking a little short in the body, but apparently the reality didn’t sink in until he saw the jaws of sharp, cold steel poised above a solitary, innocent stitch.

“Are you sure? I feel like I’m going to cry!”

This was so plaintive that I found I just couldn’t do it. I put the scissors down. I put him back in the sweater. (Dang, that little bit of ribbing sure did draw the sleeves in snug!)

“Can’t we just block it?”

The man has been learning by osmosis! He’s actually picking this stuff up! And he might even be right. A good stiff blocking all over might just make it possible for us not to cut apart the sweater. (Although I might still add those short rows.) I agreed that I’d knit the neck band and then we’d block it and see where we stood.

Into the tub with you, purple sweater. Grow, grow!

I haven’t written a lot about the Cocoon-Stitch Half-Circle Shawl, but I’ve been steadily working away at it this summer. The pattern is written line by line, with no chart, so it requires a good stretch of uninterrupted knitting time and a well-placed Post-It note to make progress. I took it for train knitting when we went up to Seattle in August to see a Mariners game, and then I had a nice quiet evening of knitting with my friend Leigh to bring it close to the end. I actually almost finished the pattern on the Seattle trip, but I had quite a bit of the glorious Toots Le Blanc merino/angora yarn leftover and didn’t want to waste a yard, so while Leigh was regaling me with stories of her trip to Ireland as we drank lemonade and ate Irish bourbon chocolates on a sticky summer night, I worked back through the pattern to find a point where the increases would align so I could add another couple of cocoon rows. (I had to go all the way back to Row 78, in case you decide to do the same, to match up the peculiar scheme of increases. I worked Rows 78-89 over again before I knit the edging.) Two ridges of garter edging seemed a bit skimpy, and I still had yarn left. I thought I might as well add some nupps before the cast off, since they’re so adorable, and since my Addi Lace needles make me want to show off with nonchalant p7tog maneuvers.

And I still had some yarn left.

I started the bind-off during our book club meeting as we discussed Reading Lolita in Tehran (which we agreed was a disappointment, but did make us want to read or re-read the classic novels Nafisi mentions). I wasn’t too far in when I realized I was in trouble. Yes, I was running out of yarn. This has become a bit of a theme for me this year… I don’t know whether I’ve gotten over-confident or what. I already knew there wasn’t a lot in the stash that might blend well enough with the Toots Le Blanc to get me through the second half of the bind-off. I looked anyway the next morning, when I had some light to really compare colors. Nope, nothing really close enough to do justice to such an elegant little piece of knitting. But Toots Le Blanc is run out of Hillsboro, OR, just over the West Hills. Maybe I could beseech them to clip me just a few yards of Fawn merino/angora? I wrote them an e-mail.

The following day I had two messages back, one from each of the owners, saying that they did often have mill ends and would check right away. In no time I had confirmation from Michele that she had a few spare yards of Fawn and could pop them in the mail to me or hand them off in person on her return from a business trip. So we arranged to meet in a Starbucks parking lot. She pulled up with her minivan stuffed to the gills with bags of beautiful piebald Jacob fleece, and we quickly skeined off enough of the merino/angora for me to finish my little shawl.

So I was able to finish comfortably, and now I’ve popped the luscious little thing into a Eucalan bath so it can bloom to full bunnycrack goodness. (I won’t block it very aggressively, as I’m quite fond of the three-dimensional character of the cocoons.) Just one more reason to seek out a great little local company, folks! Toots Le Blanc really went the extra mile for me, and I couldn’t be more in love with their product. I’d love to have the budget for enough of the merino/angora for one of the big shawls in Nancy Bush’s Estonian lace book, but for the time being I’ll hope to try Toots’s Blue-Face Leicester/Pygora laceweight, which could yield a small shawl for $30. So go forth and knit local—you never know when it’s going to save your bacon!