Knitting -- Adventures in Argyle

Argyle is a handsome pattern that deserves to make a comeback.  You can find it at a few stores, but if it's socks you have to wear them with a solid color top. You can't find matching sets.

Which is one thing that drove me to knit socks in the first place: so they would match the sweater.

If you suddenly dig up your grandmother's heirloom instructions for knitting argyle tops, I hope you follow along and when you find something that will help all of us, post it on your blog and send me a link to it.

There are three types of argyle sweaters. One is argyle all over; the second is argyle in the body with solid color sleeves; and the third has an argyle front and the rest is knitted in one of the colors.

The traditional way is to work in the flat and have a bobbin of each color of yarn, then sew seams when you finish knitting. Here's a vintage pattern. It needs some work.
http://freevintageknitting.com/free-sweater-pattern/cm736/ladys-argyle-pullover

For example, they tell you to get 5 skeins of the main color, and then told you to wind six bobbins from it. I'm sorry, how do I do that without unwinding the entire skein, measuring 5/6 of it, and without the yarn getting all tangled up? Not in my universe.

And then you have the 6th bobbin with all the spare pieces. I'm sure they think they're saving  you money but -- must have been a man wrote those instructions.

My position is, there's no such thing as too much yarn because you can always use it up for something else. So I had enough yarn, I just needed the bobbins to wind it on. Easy buy.  Here are two of them, one wound and one empty.  The central part is about 1 1/4 inch and the sides 2 1/2. Each bobbin winds 30 yards of yarn or so.

See those little slots that run parallel to the flanges? When you're done wrapping, you thread the tail through those to keep the bobbin from unrolling. Unthread the tail when you need more yarn to knit with and then stick it back in again.




The pattern tops out at a 16. Not for the womanly figure or the modern demographic. Also, the photo doesn't show the classical diamonds made of lines that most argyles have. I copied the chart into a spreadsheet and fitted it onto my standard pullover dimensions that fit me. I wound up with twenty diamonds around the body in two colors, (the original pattern uses three) so I should have bought 20 bobbins. Well, they came in packages of 6 so I bought 18 and did the last diamond from a yarn ball instead of from a bobbin. Then I messed around figuring out where to put the lines.



You have to knit the body before you can add the lines.  I had the idea of knitting in the round using my Fair Isle techniques, so I tried it.

Boy did I get a wrong number. You get dimples. You can't do the lines over these dimples in the required duplicate stitch. It just doesn't work. Don't go there.




I ignored the instructions in the pattern that didn't fit me and dug up videos on techniques I had to learn to work in the round for this pattern.  For example, you will need Fair Isle techniques for a couple of things and that's the next session.

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