Movie sweater

The next project in the works is another baby sweater, either for my friend Elisa or for the choir auction this weekend. It is my attempt to copy this amazing sweater from the new Chronicles of Narnia movie that I have been obsessing about ever since I rented the DVD.

The real sweater is clearly knit at a finer gauge than I am knitting (or at least it is a bigger size with the same gauge), and is done in pieces, whereas I am attempting to do mine in my standard top-down raglan design that I have used for all baby sweaters. My plan so far has been to do the seed stitch yoke in the raglan design, trying to make the increases as inconspicuous as possible. I have done a good job of that, I think, though it took a few moments of mind-melting to figure out how:


Then at the moment I stop the seed stitch, to increase the arm stitches by 1/3, thereby imitating the look of a gathered, set-in sleeve. At the moment I am slowly tapering back down on the arm stitches, so that the arms are not super-wide all the way down. We'll see how it turns out. I don't imagine that it will look exactly like a set-in-sleeve, designed-in-pieces, vintage sweater, but hopefully it will look close. I have also done some modifications to the flowers on the front placket, making mine fair isle flowers instead of blocks of color. This modification was done for my own sanity because the super-long floats that resulted from sort of an unhappy marriage of stranded green and intarsia pink were making me crazy. But I am not super-satisfied with the result: I think that it looks less vintage and a little too conventional-cutesy for my taste. But the thought of ripping back that pattern again has me deciding to forge on and hope that the finished product will be less cutesy than the single flower looks, and that the adult color scheme offsets the twee flowers.