Growing up I was never really a fan of sweaters. Being a child of the 80′s, I consider this quite understandable given the sea of huge shapeless sacks (with or without loud intarsia) of that time. However I remember whilst looking through the back of a closet one day, coming across some of my mother’s clothes from the 1970′s.

In the assortment was a fitted rust colored sweater with cables and lace and subtle pouf sleeves. I brought it out to show my Mom saying “Hey, this is actually cute!”. Apparently it was one of her most favorite pieces; she loved the sweater and hadn’t been able to bring herself to part with it.

When I started knitting, I remembered this sweater, it being the only one from my pre-knitting years I could ever recall really liking. I started to think about recreating it. I asked my mother if she would ship it to me so I could study it, now with a knitter’s eye.

Now I can appreciate it even more. I love the cute split collar, the way the lace repeat travels down the arm and is framed with the cables and the deep ribbing at the waist. While the sweater does still fit me, I want to recreate it making a few updates/modifications. Mainly this will be extending the body ribbing to make it less of a cropped waist (for today’s lower rise pants) and changing the sleeve length. Right now they hit really high on the wrist. I’m still deciding on whether to shorten to 3/4 length or lengthen for full. Anyone care to weigh in on that?

Here’s my first swatch, to work out the lace and rough gauge. Please ignore the glaring error but I like this idea of using a strong eyelet pattern that shows through on the reverse purl side. I decided on Knit Picks Swish DK in mustardy Grain Heather for the yarn.

Proof my mother did wear this sweater a lot, a photo of her wearing said sweater at my first birthday. Yep that’s little melon-head baby me, also with my dad and my awesome 1982 Strawberry Shortcake theme cake.