My Psychedelic Sweater

I'd like to say here, at the outset, that I don't normally wear bright colors. I usually wear dark and muted-colored clothing and try to project a professional image in my work attire. I say this because my latest sartorial creation is uncharacteristically exuberant. The back story is that I've been quite taken with Kauni effektgarn in the rainbow colorway. At the same time, I found a beautiful brocade pattern by Kim Hargreaves and decided to combine the two. I'm still not sure if it was a completely compatible marriage of yarn and pattern.

The original pattern was for a vest and you can see that in the shaping, which I do like.

The process of putting together the sweater began with cutting the steek ...

... and then designing a sleeve pattern. Again, this was taken from a vest pattern, so I had to figure out what design to use for the sleeves. I decided to take a small motif from the pattern on the front of the body which you can see here:

However, making the rest of the sleeves all black did not work. I thought it would tone down the vivid colors of the sweater, but it just looked as though it was from a completely different sweater. So, after this false start, I decided to combine the flower motif from the front with the stripes from the back of the body. I also decided to use a "Siamese" or "twin steek" in order to keep the color changes as consistent as possible across the two sleeves.

Fraternal twins, separated at birth:

Here are some further project details if you're still with me:

The pretty leaf design in the front blended together too much and I don't really care for the combination of green and orange, so I used double-stitching to highlight the pattern in blue.

Meanwhile, the buttons bring out the red.

A bientot!