My Sister's Sweater

Here is the sweater that my sister has asked me to reproduce. She's had it for years, and you can see how worn out it's become. She just loves it to death because it is 100% cashmere. She's asked me a big favor - make one that is close to this as possible. So I said I'd take a look at this and see what I could come up with. I've asked Knitgenia to help me out with this. Today she came over and bought a nice plate of brownies, and we had lunch, then got down to business.

As you can see, the color is charcoal, and it's been felted due to heavy wear, so it's kind of hard to see what the stitch pattern is. From what I can tell, on the back you can see that it is comprised of 2 knit, 1 purl, or 3 knit, 1 purl. On the front, it looks like there's this yarn-over or wrap around thing going on, and you get sort of a diamond-like appearance. At the sleeve edge, which flares out a little bit, and at the bottom, there's a plain garter stitch pattern, measuring 3 inches. Also, the collar is garter stitch and folds in half. It was difficult to make out this collar because it is almost detached from the sweater. However, I was able to unravel a hanging piece of yarn away so I could see how thick the yarn is.

Here's a close-up of the stitch pattern. Upon closer examination, Knitgenia determined that this seems to be a brioche pattern and was able to find one in “A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns” by Barbara G. Walker - Diagonal Brioche on page 220. As for the yarn, upon closer look it seems to be fingering weight, which sounds about right as this was obviously machine knit. However, I will not be using fingering weight to knit this as it would take me forever. Rather, I'll move a step up to DK, which should give a similar look but not be too much of a royal pain. Also, I am thinking of knitting it in the round so that I don't have to deal with 3 long pieces. Also, it's going to be shorter.