an opinionated knitter's introduction

By way of introduction, I wanted to post a picture of the last sweater I completed. While it's nothing from an EZ book, and I suspect more of the shaping and what not is actually derived from my experience of several Alice Starmore patterns, this sweater is definatly "in the tradition" of Elizabeth Zimmerman.



The sweater is knit with Harrisville Designs Shetland (Colors: "Loden" and "Perl"), in the round, with steeks, my own amalgamation of patterns, knitted in hems, and some EZ good sense.

Oh and. I'm teaching a class at a local yarn store (St. Louis) on stranded knitting and design, at the moment, which is a great lot of fun.

But I'm sure you want to hear about the pattern, and my connection to EZ. Well.

For the knitted in hem, I used an EZ-related technique taken from Joyce Williams' book Latvian Dreams where you use a larger needle for the joining round which diminishes a ridge. The truth is that I don't use very much EPS these days, I make drop shouldered sweaters most of the time, and I tend to make the sleeves from the shoulder down, which means that I rarely have to deal with sleeve related EPSing.

The picture I post is actually something of a cheat: one of the sleeves isn't quite done (but I have since finished it.) I like knitting sleeves down from the armholes, and I also tend to find that I like wider (and longer) sleeves than most EZ (and starmore) sweaters call for, so I just figure that I have to monkey around with that by now.

I guess the only other thing about this/my swears that I should point out is that I'm particularly prone to shaping my necks with this open/sporty neck that is cut open a bit less than half way down the neck yoke. I've always thought that this particular feature makes a sweater more wearable, it keeps the wool off the neck and that's a good thing.

Anyway, comments, reflections, etc. are welcome. And I'm glad that there's so much celebration of EZ on the web, you folks are my kind of knitters.

I'll see you around.

cheers,
tycho

ps. I'm going to knitting camp (driving tomorrow), and I'm going to attempt to blog about it, both before and after at TealArt and /tychoish. I also have a backlog of pictures that I'll post, if you're interested. I'll be in touch. But I look forward to hearing from you.