The new Vogue Knits came yesterday. Nothing that immediately jumped out and said "knit me as I am," but there is one pattern that I am going to try altering and making out of a different fiber.

It's pattern #20, the simple Debbie Bliss one-button cardigan. It's made of a cotton as shown, but when I saw the sweater I thought, "aha, there's a simple cardigan where I could use some of the wool/alpaca blend that was an impulse buy from Elann last fall."

And then I thought some more: "It's awfully plain. Miles and miles of stockinette. And stockinette rolls on the edges." And then I looked at the DNA helix scarf I had been working on and it occurred to me: why not alter the pattern a bit? Stick in a little seed stitch here and there to make the finished product more interesting and to prevent rolling.

So here is my plan: Do an inch and a half of seed stitch along the bottom of the hems and sleeves. Do four to six stitches worth of seed stitch up each front opening side (I will have to look at how the buttonhole is done. I seem to remember it as a button loop, which would fit in with what I want to do, but if it's a buttonhole I may have to change it to a loop, a la the Sitcom Chic).

The neckline was a question. I don't want to do seed stitch along the top, I think that would look funny. So I'm going to look through my accumulated patterns and see if there's a good description of an applied collar...you know, like the collar on a barn coat or a squared-off edge collar. And I will do that in seed stitch too, so it matches.

And the pattern as written has pockets, but I'm going to change that a bit too - and do the pocket openings on waste yarn as for the Bookworm Vest, and do pocket edging in seed stitch (the pattern, as written, has no pocket edgings).

And that is one of the things I love about knitting - the fact that you can take neat little details from one pattern and plug them into another.

It was all I could do last night as I thought about this not to run into my stash closet and grab the alpaca and start. I do have to decide whether to use the spruce-green or the wine color. At first I thought the wine color would be best, but now I'm leaning towards the green, and "saving" the lighter-colored wine yarn for a pattern with cables.

This will be my first real attempt at altering a sweater pattern. If this goes well, I might do the tweaks to the Sitcom Chic pattern that I've been thinking about - lengthen the sleeves to wrist length and do pockets. My original thought was patch pockets, but the set-in "invisible" pockets with a band or edging like the Bookworm vest look so much cooler. I'll have to do some measuring on my existing Sitcom Chic and plan out where they would go the best. (the edging would be just a short bit of the 3 x 3 rib, like on the edges of the sweater).

perhaps, someday I will actually design my own sweaters.