Men Who Knit Promoting and inspiring the art of knitting amongst men.

A few weeks back I acquired some ICE felt yarn on ebay in a coffee brown and light blue, two colors I like together a lot, and since I had soaked up the holiday time finishing off a ribbed gray sweater, I decided to experiment with this new yarn. It's wool and spun single-ply with lots of thin and thick places - trying to reproduce the effect of some handspun yarns I think.

I really liked the plaited basket weave stitch that some people were discussing here recently (and I think someone recently posted a photo of a scarf they had complete using this stitch), and I wondered how it would look done with this irregular yarn. I also knew that regular, tighly spun worsted yarns are preferred for knitting cables, but since I was experimenting I wanted to see what a cable would look like done with this irregular yarn. So, I knitted up some test swaths, and I'm now over half done with the back of a sweater.

In the photo, you can see a test swath I did of a two-color cable that I'm hoping to run up the sleves and over the shoulders to the neck. I'm also thinking about doing a placket collar. Let me know what you think. I don't know how it will turn out, but I kind of like the sort of "distressed" look the yarn gives to the cables, and I thought the plaited basked stitch made a nice texture.