This is a sweater I recently finished that I spent three looonng months knitting for my husband. It is knit with an Anatolian (Turkish) motif called the Ram's Horn that symbolizes studliness. Normally a man's sweater would take me about three weeks to knit, but this one gave me nothing but grief. For starters, I kept making mistakes in the body where the diamond+stripe vertical pattern would inadvertently change to ram's horn+stripe (and I wouldn't notice until I finished the body). I had to substantially rip back the body three times because of that. Then I had to rip back a portion of the body a few times to get the neckline and arm syce perfect. The sweater is of my own design, but I got the Ram's Horn motif from a Meg Swanson book (I think).
A detail of the ribbing, neckline, and arms can be found at http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/project1/image10.jpg http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/project1/image11.jpg and http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/project1/image12.jpg
The sweater and arms are knit mainly in the round using the Philosopher's Wool fair isle technique. At the arm syce in the body I switched to stockinette fair isle where I devised my own method of Philospher's Wool fair isle-ish technique for the purl side. Perhaps I'll write a post on that sometime since I haven't seen the technique I devised talked about on any other knitting web site or blog. Because of the tightly knit fair isle, the sweater is darn near bullet proof and is very, very warm.
This sweater is the most time consuming knitting project I have ever done, bar none. If you notice the bar+stripe vertical pattern change to ram's horn+stripe at any place in the sweater, please don't let me know...I am sick of working on it.
Other recent projects can be seen here http://radio.weblogs.com/0151290/project1/image8.jpg ; The green sweater with poor contrast in the picture is a V-neck sweater I knit for my favourite uncle. The plain boot socks I knit for myself, and the fancier cable boot socks I knit for a friend I am about to visit in San Francisco tomorrow (I am flying there to attend a Stitches knitting convention). Believe it or not, the plain and the fancy boot socks are exactly the same size, and fit with the same amount of ease when you have them on....the wonders of ribbing.
