Still knitting after all these years!

Oh, it has been a while since I blogged, and I apologize to you, my loyal readers! I have been knitting away, though, and post my sweater creations on Ravelry regularly. My most recent project was inspired by my enjoyment of lace knitting, and the fascination I have had for the work of Herbert Niebling, who designed lace in Germany in the 1930-60's and whose patterns have created a new craze as they are being re-discovered by a new generation of knitters. Reprints of his work can be found in the original German, and in English on Ravelry.com and  doilyhead.wordpress.com.
After designing, in fingering-weight yarn, my circular lace vest, "Vestborough", I had worked out the numbers for that gauge, so I thought it might be fun to find a doily pattern that would work as a sweater . It needed to have under 150 rows for my size, and an obvious break around row 60 to insert sleeves. The "Sirius" doily pattern by Herbert Niebling fit the bill, so I knit this sweater. I modified the last 10 or 15 rows to create a more interesting edge, and used a picot bindoff to add a lacier edge, as I had seen my friend Andrea do on one of her sweaters.I also flipped the top half of the edge to reverse stockinette so that when folded back the collar would be right-side out.    Working out how to design the sleeves took a bit of trial and error, as the first sleeve design's lace  was too busy, and I did not want to knit plain stockinette sleeves. A raglan sleeve cap makes the sweater sit better on the shoulders and fits reasonably well with the geometry of the piece, though I think it works a bit better on a pentagonal shape than a hexagon, which is what this design is based on. So, here is the sweater, which looks wonderful on my mannequin! The yarn is a fingering weight linen chain yarn, which I had on a large cone. It took about 1200 yards for the whole thing.

http://www.ravelry.com/projects/knitbird/sirius