Japanese Cable Vest KAL

On the Japanese Knitting and Crochet Group on Ravelry a KAL has been proposed for this cabled vest knitting pattern which is a free Japanese knitting pattern available on the Woolmark Company, a Japanese yarn company, website.

I haven't started the first vest I thought I'd would yet, so the idea of a KAL to get me started and motivated seems like a good idea. The pdf for the pattern is only one page! It still amazes me that the Japanese can write their patterns in so little space. The same pattern written out in English would be at least 3 pages.

Here is a picture of the chart:



Now, really it isn't as scary as it looks. Luckily, I have a couple of Japanese knitting symbol books to help me out.

The space on the graph that has a has a smaller chart to the left of the main chart



This means that those 2 blocked out stitches are work as the smaller chart. It looks like some kind of bobble. We've decided that we are not going to do this part of the chart. I'm not much into bobbles plus if you look at the photo, the bobbles land right on the bust of the model and look like nipples! No, thank you!

The first thing I'm going to do for this pattern is find some yarn to swatch the chart. But that means I need to translate the chart. So I'm off to find those Japanese knitting symbol books now! Oh and a yarn that gets gauge of 15 stitches and 22 rows in 10 cm as the pattern calls for.

Feel free to join the KAL even if you aren't on Ravelry (they are still in beta and you need an invitation to join which you can get by signing up from a link on the main page of the site). You can post comments here and on future posts that link to your progress on your blog.