Modified to be knit in one piece from the top down, like almost everything I’m knitting these days.

The second-from-bottom project photo shows the basic plan for the top part of the sweater. I cast on for the neckline, and knit the top part of the bodice and the shoulders together straight (not in the round), starting and finishing each row on either side of where the central neckline cable would go.

When I reached the point at the bottom of the center neckline cable, I cast on the extra stitches for that cable, joined the ends and knit the rest of the body in the round down to the lower hem.

From the beginning I planned to change the cable section around the waist, which I didn’t think would look as slimming as I’d like. So the plan was to knit cable braids at the side, with a central cable continuing down to the bottom edge (see third image, which is a side view).

The results are terrific. Those cable braids nip in the waist with lovely shaping, and the vertical plain ribbing in the body’s center does its job of “elongating the silhouette.” An advantage of top-down knitting is, of course, that you can try on the partially knitted sweater to find the best placement for the waist shaping.

What backfired, though, was the openwork neckline and collar as designed in the original. Although I didn’t have any problems in the knitting, the holes on either side of the cable were all slightly different sizes, so that part looked really unbalanced. It was drawing the eye, but not in a good way.

I also realized that it’s actually not my taste to have keyhole necklines like this. Never in my life have I bought a shirt with a cutout over the breastbone. It had to go.

Very careful unraveling and a few dozen ends to weave in, and I was able to dissect the neckline cable, and knit it again as a “regular” 4x4 cable that was completely attached at the sides. There are some visible signs of this re-do, but you have to look pretty hard to see them.

Carried each side of the neckline center cable up into a modified stand-up collar. Instead of the solid turtleneck, this is open at the front and a little more elegant. Makes the cable look better, too, as the cable leads upward.

Final results are good. I’m still baffled by how best to use the Sugarloaf yarns that I bought at Webs in Massachusetts (one of their house yarns). The ribs really ate up this yarn: it’s a very thick, dense sweater. I finished this in May, when the weather is warm, so won’t wear this until winter. I predict it will be a very warm sweater.

Sugarloaf does keep a lot of “spring” in the ribbing. I blocked this with lots of steam and the ribbing hasn’t spread out and lost its elasticity. My hope is that this will make the sweater fitted without being tight.

The 14 balls that I had set aside for this project weren’t enough to finish it without making the body and arms uncomfortably short. Big thanks to Ravelry angels lexanddamian and senf27 for each sharing a matching dye-lot skein each from their stashes. That held up the project for a while, hunting for new skeins, but was worth it!

I used almost the entire 16 skeins. At the given yardage per ball, this totals up to 800 grams. I weighed the sweater and it clocked in at 738 grams -- 14.8 skeins. Either my scale is off, or the average yardage per skein is wrong, or I miscounted the balls that I used. Maybe one will show up under the seat of the car some day.

The close-up project photos make the yarn look a bit heathered -- not the case. The yarn does get a bit fuzzy.

Valley Sugarloaf in Eggplant is a solid color. Hard to photograph this shade -- it’s much more richly purple than these images show. Bottom image is taken from the Webs site which sells the yarn, and is a closer approximation.

This pattern is a piece of cake; a good basic sweater that adapts well for top-down knitting. As I add this to Ravelry, only three other people have projects listed under this pattern. Give it a try!