I’m fascinated with the wool with the long colour gradations called Kauni Effektgarn. (That’s a Ravelry link.) This is going to be a zip-front cardigan for Mr. C. – the plan is for it to replace one of his fleeces. It’ll be warmer, plus I think it’ll look better than recycled pop bottles ever could.

Not that I’m biased toward knitted sweaters!

I decided to knit a top-down raglan. This is because you do all the math at the beginning, then just knit. Also, the pieces match perfectly – a good thing with stripes like the Kauni makes – and the only seam you have to sew up is a little teeny one in each underarm. Finally, you can try it on as you go, and check the fit. This beats the heck out of frogging an entire sweater.

There are a lot of free top down raglans available in the wide world. Here’s one at Woolworks. Designer Stephanie Japel has created a lot of patterns for top down raglans – here’s her instructions on designing your own.

Once you’ve made the basic calculations, you can play.

I had bought two colours of the Kauni – the slowly changing blue called EL and the rainbow gradation called EQ. My plan was to do “something fair isle”. Since it’s for Mr. C. and I knew he wouldn’t wear it if it was too vivid, the idea was for the jacket to be mostly blue with intermittent fair isle stripes in the two colourways.

A terrific resource for fair isle – including its history and a number of patterns – is Alice Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting. This book has been out of print for some years, and used hard cover copies were selling for incredible prices. The good news for all of us knitters is that the book is being reprinted in paper this year – you can preorder a copy at the online booksellers for $20 or so. Or you can look in your library for a copy.

I had Mr. C. choose three fair isle patterns that were variations on a theme – a “peerie” or narrow pattern, a wider pattern and a border. All of the ones he chose use the same motif – in this case, a diamond, although there are lovely patterns in stars, X’s and O’s, lots of choices. These were the ones he liked and it’s his sweater. Let’s call them 1, 2 and 3, 1 being the narrowest and 3 the widest. I’ve knit them 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 1 – 2 – 3 – 2 etc. with 6 rows of the blue between each one.

I just split the work for the underarms, so you can have a peek. Here we are.

Knitting this has been addictive. There’s just something about self-striping yarns that always has me knitting one more row “just to see”. I’m not a fast knitter, but I can be an obsessive one! One of the fun things about fair isle is that if you make a small mistake, it tends to get lost.

Mr. C. loves this sweater. He says it awakens his inner Celt – we all have one – but I think the way the colours shift and change on this sweater is even more magickal than that. I’m calling it the Elrond Sweater, just the thing for those chilly evenings at Rivendell.

A few details:

• Most of these raglan patterns suggest starting at the collar line, then going back, picking up stitches and adding the collar when the rest of the sweater is done. I knew the blue probably wouldn’t match if I did that, so I took a chance and started at the collar cast-on instead. I used the same number of stitches that I’d calculated to cast on at the neck, then because it looked SO BIG, I worked it in 2×2 ribbing. Voilà. The collar is done and it matches.

• I also ran a cable down either side of the front, the two cables mirroring each other to frame the zipper. I like the look of cables with fair isle – one designer who seems to put the two together a lot is Fiona Ellis. This particular cable is a 12 stitch band on each side, with 2 purl stitches on either side of the 8-stitch cable – purl stitches always make cables pop from the background of the sweater – and the cable twists every 8 rows.

• I’ll knit I-cord down the fronts as well, in contrast, to accent the opening even more, then will edge cuffs and hem the same way as the collar. I’d like them all to be the same green, so here’s hoping I have enough.

• It’s kind of fun how the gradation of the rainbow is working out – I like that it made one cycle from green to red from the neck to the underarms. The rainbow goes from red into purple, blue and turquoise, but I’ve broken that section of the colourway out of the yarn. There just won’t be enough contrast in the fair isle against the blue background. I’m heading back from red to green again.

The sleeves will change colour more slowly than the body, because there will be fewer stitches. I had debated the merit of breaking the yarn to make everything matchy-matchy, but have decided to just go with it. As long as the sleeves match each other, it’ll look good.

It’s going to shrink a little bit when I wash and block it, about 1/8″ for every inch, so the yarn will tighten up and the fair isle will snap even more. The wool also softens and fulls in the wash, making it look a bit fuzzier. I like how the swatch looks, so am aiming for the same finish.

So, what do you think?