Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

I took a little time over the weekend to swatch. I used size 10.5 (i.e. 6.5 mm) needles. I used two strands of yarn together at the same time. At first, I tried 1x1 ribbing over 20 stitches with a 3x3 Lily Chin ribble in the center. Not bad, but the knit stitches of the ribbing just don't do anything for me. I like cables set against a wavy reverse stockinette stitch background. The problem for me with the ribble technique is that you can't get the purl background. Changing to purl 1, knit 1 for the background doesn't make the purls jump forward and the knits recede backward. You can see on the swatch that I tried it, just to be quite certain. (And as I write this, I'm suddenly wondering if doing the background in garter stitch would have worked.) I do, however, like the thickness and double-sided quality of the ribbles. Especially in this fuzzy yarn, cables need to be big and burly to show. Stitch definition in this fuzzy alpaca? -- see Myopia or Astigmatism. The Lucy ...

The last two sweaters I'm posting in this series both come from Debbie New's wonderful book Unexpected Knitting (Pittsville, WI: Schoolhouse Press 2003). This is knitting for PhDs. And do not try to read the whole thing at once. Read one chapter. Give it time to digest. Then read another. Do be nice to your brain. The same sweater, above and below. The magic of double-knitting! I decided that I wanted to try the ouroborus sweater. Ms. New works hers from the center outwards, using double-increases. As tidy double-increases are not as easy to work as tidy double-decreases, I did the math to work mine in the other direction. The yarn is Takhi Cotton Classic left over from a flamingo-patterned sweater that I made for ZooAtlanta's 2004 Beastly Feast. The fair isle heart pattern is of my own devising. And, silly me, I couldn't decided whether I wanted white hearts on pink or pink hearts on white, so I compromised and double-knit the whole thing. It is reversible...