Racing Plaid

First, a week-old snapshot of my half-finished Sidewinders. I now have just 12 rows to knit on the second sock, plus the grafting.




The socks will have to wait, however, because I have only a week to finish a little sweater for a new baby.

I decided that I wanted to knit a green plaid sweater. The last plaid sweater I knit was a raglan, and the shaping was a little odd in the slip-stitch plaid pattern. I thought about the possibility of adding some plain color stripes to the plaid pattern and knitting the sweater with a round yoke.

I started swatching sections of plaid with different kinds of stripes:




From the right, I tried a 2-row dark green stripe, a 2-row yellow stripe, and a 3-row medium green stripe. Totally blah.

Then I tried single-row stripes of first medium green, then yellow, then dark green, and then medium green again. Aha. Now that pattern has legs on it.

Immediately, I saw that I could surround 2.5 repeats of the basic plaid pattern with the single-row stripes and get something that sang. I could start with a block of yellow-dark green-yellow-dark green-yellow, add a dark green and then a yellow stripe, and follow with a block of dark green-yellow-dark green-yellow-dark green and a yellow and then dark green stripe. They alternate, and are framed by mirrored alternate color stripes.

I decided to call this new pattern Racing Plaid. Here's a chart of my Racing Plaid pattern.

It was time to cast on and knit the yoke:




And then time to move onto the body:




I'm really like how this is going. I hope I have time to add a hood when I'm done.