Alcyone

Where to buy Alcyone Sweater Pattern

Alcyone is a star in the Pleiades. Alcyone the sweater is a straight forward yoke sweater knit in the round with twist stitch hexagons and stars. It’s a part of the Rise Up Collection from the On Target Design group, and their council and friendship helped me design it all through this year. We took the theme and colors from the Pantone report, and played a stitches game. So many designers publish patterns with the same stitches in them at the same time accidentally. We wanted to know what would happen if we did it on purpose?

You get a collection of patterns from 7 different designers, that’s what happens. It’s like a taste sampling to see who your new favorite designers are.

Because of this group, I’ve been watching fashion trends more closely. Marcela Chang noticed that sleeves were getting more poofy on Instagram, like they were when I was in high school in the 1980’s. I am a plus sized knitter with, ‘fluffy,’ arms, so I don’t mind looser sleeves. But it’s been so long since sweaters with ease in the arms and body were being published, that my technical editor urged me to point out fitting tips, especially with the sleeve cuff. That post is coming tomorrow. I left the body in stockinette, so knitters with their favorite waist and bust shaping methods have room to insert them without having to work around surface decoration.

I knew that this hexagon was for me when we were suggesting and voting on stitches. There is no work/rest row rotation in this hexagonal twist stitch, so I wanted an in the round construction method for my sweater. Yokes are my favorite, so that choice was easy. My collaborators reminded me that there are already solidly colored yoke sweaters with hexagons, so I needed a variation. Hexagons have all the angles needed for six pointed stars, so I searched for star tessellations that I could decrease around a yoke. It was like playing with my kids’ pattern blocks. My test knitters mentioned that the yoke was fun to knit too. I hope you will enjoy the way it morphs from stockinette to pattern to ribbing smoothly.

The stars happened to grade in convenient stitch counts, so I was able to make 5 yoke sizes with a proportional star in each size. This means that the knitters shaped like me get pretty sweaters, and the knitters shaped like the model do too.

These photos are of the smallest size. My collaborator Laura hosted the photo shoot at her home. It was foggy and 31 degrees outside. Avi Dascaloff the photographer had a new camera. The model was professional about the cold, but she told Laura that she wanted to keep wearing Alcyone. What a compliment! I think the wind resistance she was enjoying comes from the way the yarn is spun, I’ll be posting about that the day after tomorrow.

Here is the schematic: