Knitting Therapy: Agnes & Joy

I am becoming a huge fan of Kim Hargreaves' knitting designs. In perusing many of her books and designs in magazines, I've noticed that she frequently tweaks and modifies the same basic design for different yarns and seasons. I feel this frees me up from slavishly following any one of her particular patterns and gives me implicit permission to mix and match her ideas and design elements. Accordingly, I've taken two of her very similar designs and decided to combine and modify them to fit my particular preferences.

"Agnes" is an older design published in Rowan Magazine 35 (Spring/Summer 2004) made up in a cotton yarn with bracelet length sleeves. "Joy" is a newer design published in Vintage Knits and features a tweeded yarn with a chevron design done in beads knitted into the body of the cardigan. It's an interesting idea to pair beads with a tweeded yarn - evoking two different moods - so I thought I'd try it. However, Danish damask (knitting a pattern into stockinette stitch using purl stitches) drives me crazy! Although it looks pretty, I constantly lose my place and get frustrated. So, forget it. I will use a simple placement for the beads following the placement of French knots in the Agnes pattern. (I also could not bear the idea of making a zillion French knots.) So, to my mind this is a happy hybrid of two Hargreaves designs. We shall see how it turns out.