I have this Liz Claiborne sweater that I got years ago, and I was fascinated by the stitch pattern. When I started knitting, I was struck by the thought that I could probably reproduce it, and when I sat down to try it a year or so later, it worked. So clearly, I had to reverse engineer the whole sweater.

Since the original sweater is cotton, I was planning to find a nice cotton yarn for my new rendition. But I had this lingering desire to try a sweater in Silky Wool, and once it occurred to me to try it here, I was hooked. I had also been thinking about trying Happy, which has a neat three-against-two color sequence, and that inspired me to change the two-color stripes in the original to a three-color ABCB pattern.

The stitches in my sweater were bigger than in the original, but with a ruler and some scratch paper I had no major trouble reconstructing the pattern in the new gauge.

The stitch pattern has three-stitch cabled columns with one stitch in between. On non-twist right side rows, you knit 3 and slip 1. On wrong side rows, you purl three and knit the slipped stitch together with the stitch below it. This gives more open spaces between the cable columns, which makes the cabled texture pop nicely. Every eighth row, you make a one-over-two left cable twist, which is easiest to do without a cable needle, as shown in this video: you slip one, you knit two, you insert the left needle into the slipped stitch from the front, pinch the two you just knit, and pull the right needle out, behind the slipped stitch, and back into the two knits, then knit the slipped stitch. When the color changes, the new color starts on the twist row.

The keyhole neckline was particularly fun.