Adapted from:
Alison Hansel in Charmed Knits
Elizabeth Zimmermann in Knitting Without Tears

It started with a gift. One, simple gift, from my friend Blaire for Christmas. It wasn’t much, but the fact was, she had gone through the effort of making me a bag of granola, and I hadn’t done squat for her. So I picked up my copy of Charmed Knits, and proceeded to make her a mini-sweater.

Three hours later, I had finished, and I was very frustrated with all of the seaming, all the ends I had to weave in, and all the little pieces and complicated joining. I knew that, if I could make these little sweaters in a seamless fashion, they would be so much more fun. So I picked up my copy of Knitting Without Tears, had it open alongside Charmed Knits on my desk, and began to merge Elizabeth Zimmermann’s brilliant seamless sweater recipes with the proportions from Alison Hansel’s little sweaters. And I couldn’t stop making them for a week.

Be warned: while these sweaters take out the seaming aspects, they make the knitting itself much more complicated (there’s a bit of short rows and quite creative grafting involved). If you would rather keep the knitting itself plain and simple, and seam quite a bit, go with Alison Hansel’s pattern. But if you want to try your hand at some Elizabeth Zimmermann brilliance, dive right in. But beware! They’re highly addictive!

20/12/10: V2 published with corrections to the hybrid.