When I saw the shop sample of Flower Child, I knew I had to make it, both because it is beautiful and because as a mathematically minded knitter, I was drawn to the elegant construction. I bought the pattern book that very day.

I had planned to wait until the spring cottons came in, but I stumbled on the Grace, a silk-wool blend, on deep discount, and there was just enough of the cerise left in the shop. As a result, my sweater is dressier than the original, especially with my knitting modifications.

Like several other Ravelry knitters, I chose to knit the back and the front as single connected pieces. Naturally, this requires a circular needle to accommodate all of the stitches as the sweater grows from the center. To avoid a gauge discrepancy between circular and flat knitting, I left the vertical seam on the back and knit the back flat. This made the cast on tricky, since it had to close up tightly when I sewed the seam from the center to the collar. My solution was to start with a provisional cast on into a bit of waste yarn. Once I had completed enough rows of knitting to make the piece flexible, I removed the waste yarn and threaded the tail of the knitting yarn through the live stitches. The process and the result are just like closing up the top of a hat knit in the round from the brim up.

Knitting the front and back as connected pieces made it easier to lengthen the sleeves (I don’t wear short sleeves). I did all of the decreases at the lower edge of each sleeve; in particular, contrary to the pattern, I kept increasing on both sides of the join between the two sleeve segments until all the stitches in the top segment were bound off. This makes the seams at the tops of the sleeves come together exactly like the seams at the sides of the sweater.

Somehow, putting ribbing at the end of the lengthened sleeves didn’t feel right to me, especially with the more luxurious yarn, and so I looked around for more decorative options. When I asked Amy at Crazy for Ewe for ideas, she happened to be working on an afghan square with a bramble stitch (also known as blackberry or trinity stitch) border, which seemed like a perfect counterpoint to the bobbles in the sweater’s central flower. Since I hated the thought of doing all that purling, I did the bramble stitch backwards, reversing the right and wrong sides so that it was mostly knitting. (This did mean doing P1, K1, P1 into the same stitch, which was a little weird, but I got used to it pretty quickly.) The cuffs and the bottom of the sweater are sections of inverted bramble framed on the top and bottom by garter stitch.