Life Savers Fruit Candy Twist Sweater

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Originally uploaded by Sheepish.

Hoooo! That's a mouthful. This is my newest baby. After months of guiltlessly wearing and enjoying the sweater I intended to be my husband's (but enduring endless comments about it anyway), I have buckled under the weight of it all and cast on for a sweater for him - in the correct size this time (Thank you Elizabeth Zimmerman). This is the sleeve, in case you're wondering.

I decided not to use a pattern for a specific sweater, because I was afraid of messing it up just like I did last time. That whole small, medium, large thing seems to throw me for a loop. Instead, I whipped out my trusty copy of Knitting Without Tears (a relatively new but fabulous addition to my ever-growing selection of knitting books), and I'm using The Knitting Goddess' formula for making a bottom-up raglan in the round.

What you see is the result of me playing around with the idea of doing a Fair Isle sweater, not liking the look of it with so many colors and going for stripes instead. It's coming along nicely, I think.

If you look closely, you can see that I've done a funny rotation with the colors so that they each get equal space on the sweater (that way no one color dominates). There are four colors. When I finish a set of the four, the first color used drops off the bottom and rolls up to be the top one on the next set. I'm thinking this look could be really cool with just the arms being striped and the body being made of a solid color (my choice would be black), but I have equal numbers of the four colors you see here, and no black, so we'll have to save that for another sweater. I'm really curious to see what the stripes will look like knit in the round like this. The arms and body will meet at the chest, and then the stripes will loop all the way around his shoulders. Not the usual look for a striped sweater, but we'll see how it looks.