I was promising myself that I would not start another project. Really I was. And then I found a lovely sweater pattern in Sally Melville's The Knit Stitch that John liked at first glance. And then I discovered that Elann had very nice prices on Austermann Rubino - a merino/acrylic blend that has a delicate look, but I think will hold up to being worn my favorite guy.

Only once I got the yarn, I discovered that in spite of it being considered "Worsted" weight by Elann, it's probably closer to a DK weight, which meant that my first guage swatch was a little too airy for the husband (even I agreed with this assessment). So I went down a few needle sizes (to 4.0 mm) and this time the fabric knit up to a better density. Well, I knit up my second swatch on my Swallow Caseins. Nice looking fabric buy way too much drag. Apparently Rubino and casein don't interact very well. So after casting on once with the Swallows and getting very annoyed very quickly with the drag issue I ripped and decided to try another pair of needles.

Since I had a 4.0 mm AddiTurbo conveniently at hand, I decided to try out the Addi. I was worried that the metal surface would over-compensate for my drag problem and give me a much looser than desired fabric, but actually, I got the exact same gauge as I did with the Swallows. Go figure. The Addis are much nicer to work with and the Rubino moves very nicely over them, so it was definitely worth the time re-swatching.

One of the neat things about this sweater is that it is a top down pattern. So I am starting with the neck and working towards the bottom. For those of us who cast on tightly, this can be something of a scary proposition. Sally, however, has a nice solution -- the crochet cast-on. For pictures of this cast on, take a look at pp. 74-75 in The Knit Stitch or check out this site. You'll have to scroll about 1/2-way down for the method and pictures. I really like this cast-on method -- it comes out nice and loose and it does provide a very nice looking edge that looks like a cast-off edge. Here's a close-up of the cast on edge from the sweater:

I just love how smooth this cast-on edge looks, and how nice and loose it is. It does take a little more time to cast-on than a long-tail cast-on, but not too much more time. It also has the extra benefit of not needing to figure out how much yarn you need for the long-tail. You just make a slip knot and cast on until you have enoug stitches, leaving whatever length tail you want. Probably the hardest thing about this cast on is making sure that you keep your tension and spacing even, otherwise you end up with areas with different tensions on the edge, which doesn't make for a very nice way to start a garment. I don't have the pictures, so you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Here's the collar, with stitch number adjusted to take into account my gauge (6 st/inch instead of 4 st/inch):

This is the perfect height collar for John, who hates things binding around his neck. The next thing to come will be figuring out the shoulder shaping. It shouldn't be too hard, but since this is one of the first times that I will have had to totally alter a pattern to do what I want with it, I am hoping that I won't miss something critical and be forced to frog back to the beginning. I think I am definitely going to put a life-line in at the base of the collar, just in case. If everything works out, I'll post my pattern modifications for anyone who might like to do this sweater in a finer gauge yarn.

I'm feeling especially motivated to work on this sweater because John has spent most of the weekend working on getting a webserver set up for me so that I can move my website to a place of unlimited disk space. It will also give me a chance to play with MovableType (which now supports PostgresSQL!)... a girl can never have too many fun computer software toys! I especially like that Moveable Type is written in Perl -- which is my current language of most expressiveness.