Warning – Swatch geek alert!

After a week of properly sitting down and planning, I have to say my cardigan design hasn’t got as far as I’d hoped.

Originally in my head I wanted to make a traditional aran style cardigan, with a hood and chunky cables.  A similar fit to the one below, I made a while ago, but longer with different cables all the way around.

I started working on the new pattern about 2 years ago and settled on this as the main cable design.  Can you imagine that as a hoodie? I can and will!

So this week I got to work on looking at other cable stitch patterns and deciding what I did and didn’t like. This one is simple but you need a couple of basic cables in there, or else it starts to look too fussy.

I also made a honeycomb stitch swatch which I think is totally awesome, but it ran away and hid somewhere after blocking and hasn’t been seen since. If you’re wondering what I’m on about, it looks like this.

However… Late on Wednesday night, after swatching, frogging, blocking, snapping etc, and generally having cables tangling around my head for the best part of 6 days, I thought, “hang on.. those 10 balls I have of Rowan Wool Cotton are 50g, not 100g.  How the hell am I going to make a cable hoodie out of that?”

Darn.

So back to square one.  I got on to Ravelry to see what other people had made with Rowan Wool Cotton and discovered something great.. This yarn likes to be knit as lace!

For all the cables I had knitted so far with this yarn I had been using 3.25mm needles.  But they just weren’t working for the lace.  The picture above is one of my favourite stitches, yet you can clearly see the difference between the smaller needles (at the bottom) and the 4mm needles I used for the part above the garter stitch.

I really love this stitch but I’m not sure if it’s a bit close in aesthetic to the cardigan below, Lichen by Lisa Richardson which I made for myself about 2 years ago.

Obviously one is cabled and one just has the effect of cables, but it is the lattice look that I am referring to. And although this pattern will be up for sale once it is complete, the designs that I write are based on things that I want to wear myself. I’m not at the stage yet where I can create something, put hours into it and then sell it or give it away.

So then I tried this stitch out.

There’s something about it I’m not sure about, and I think it’s the fact it’s so uniform. I can just see it draping in lacy rib down the front, and I find that a bit.. boring? Plus there are too many holes to make it warm.

This was the last stitch I tried out it made me happy to knit. The pattern wasn’t too repetitive and I liked how neat it looked after blocking. Initially, I felt, yay! I’ve found the one!

But now I’m not so sure! I’m drawn back to the lattice stitch every time I look at the swatch.   So thought I’d ask for help.  Imagine a round neck, classic style cardigan in either of these stitches.

Which would you go for?