Sometimes things don’t end up exactly as we’ve planned. It’s true for all of us in our everyday lives and true for designing hand knit sweaters.

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Margery whipped up these sketch while we were designing the Spring ‘08 season. We planned sweaters in pairs, each a variation on each other. Lalo was a tailored stockinette stitch pullover with an interesting split neckline, while Latifa was going to maintain the neckline details and have severel godet inserts giving it a flared swing shape. I designed a fairly elaborate ribbed insert, then Brenda (our tech editor) wrote up the pattern and sent it off to be knit. Now, I do wish I had a photo of the ribbed insert or of the sweater as it was when it came back it came back from the knitter, but I wasn’t thinking “blog” back then. I promise to try to be better in the future :) 

So, there is nothing wrong with Margery’s sketch of Latifa and nothing wrong with Brenda’s original instruction for Latifa, yet Latifa just wasn’t working. The godets were too heavy and saggy and complicated. Margery and I took one look at each other and saw the same expression of dismay on each other’s faces. We SO wanted it to work and it SO didn’t. Then the awful feeling of “I should’ve known” came over me. Maybe we had both known on some level, but instincts don’t always win out. Anyway, after taking a few minutes to get over the frustration and a few more to think about it, One of us suggested that Latifa would look pretty darn cute if we cut off all of the flared bits, and kept it plain and tailored like Lalo. We both broke out into big grins and practically jumped up and down. YES!

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I love this little sweater so much the way it is now it’s hard to remember that it started out as something different. I need one in dark brown, of course, to layer over my black batiste peasant blouse.