This is all I've been knitting. I could be halfway done a sweater by now. But I'm picky and I want it to be just so, so I'm still swatching. These swatches are big, the smaller ones are about 4" square. They are for the sweater that will have a large cable down the front with ribbing for the rest of the body. I'm planning raglan sleeves, knit in the round, probably from the bottom up.
My first pick, the Drunken Cable.
My first swatch, the little one is the cable as written in the Vogue Stitchionary 2. The bigger one is my attempt at enlarging it. Not so good. To me it looks like a big messy blob of knitting.
See, a close up of the original, much nicer.
Attempt number two the Pie Crust Cable.
Again, the smaller is the cable as written, the larger, my attempt at rewriting on a bigger scale. I also tried out different needle sizes, as well as different amounts of rows between repeats of the cable. Not too fond of this swatch either. I don't seem to have taken a close up of the small swatch, but it's very nice, with clean looking cables crossing at regular intervals, and laying flat.
One of the things I like the least about my attempts is that they get really tight where I cable the stitches. Then the knitting between gets bunchy and the whole thing looks like a mess.
Try three, the Drunken Cable bordering Pie Crust.
So then I tried this. I enlarged the patterns a bit, but not as much as my original swatches. I also used both, figuring that it could give enough width to be the center panel of a design. I'm not sure which border cable I like best. The left one is composed of 12 stitches, the right one 8. I think I like the bigger one, especially since I want the pie crust segment to be bigger than it is in this swatch. Here there are only two repeats of the pattern (width wise). I'd probably do four to eight repeats.
Anyway, moral of the story is that I've a bunch more swatching to do.
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