Web-Letter, Issue 18 – Tryst Cropped Vest Greetings—hope you had a good Thanksgiving! I thoroughly enjoyed mine—in part because it marked the end of a long-standing deadline. Just a few days before the holiday, I finished up a photo shoot for the book Color Style, due to be published by Interweave Press in Fall 2008. At the end of the last day, we took pictures of a few projects for the Web-Letter (it’s a great thing to get ahead). We had a bit of a hard time getting this little vest off the model—she would have been happy to wear it home. A good indication that the right kind of vest is as much fun to wear as it is to knit, especially when it’s whipped up in Tryst, one of CEY’s 100% cashmere yarns.
The Story: Accessories—hats, mitts, bags, etc…—are my favorite things to knit. They’re usually quick and don’t have to fit to a T to be successful. And I feel more free to use colors that I might not want to plug into an entire sweater—right now I want everything (little) to be orange. To my list of accessory things to knit, I’ve added vests. I confess that I’ve been wearing a sleeveless polar fleece thing under my coat, but now that I have a little more time, I plan to make myself a knitted version to live in. The Tryst vest is worked in pieces—back and two fronts—that begin with bands of reverse stockinette stitch to mimic the picked-up armhole and front and neckline bands. The grooved bands add interest, as does the marl-y nature of the yarn. The Yarn: Tryst — 100% cashmere Tryst is a 6-ply yarn that knits up to 31⁄2 stitches per inch on a size 9 needle. Each strand is a different color, in this case they’re nature’s subtle shades of gray, black, and brown. The six strands are plied together in candy cane fashion to make what is called a marl or mouline yarn. It’s a multi-color yarn, but the texture is smooth and the hand is supersoft—after all, it’s cashmere. Learn more about cashmere.  Where to buy Tryst. The Stitches: Picking up bands isn’t always a straightforward process. A pattern, like this one, may tell you to pick up and knit so many stitches along an edge, but depending on your gauge—which may not be the same as the original knitters—you may end up with too many stitches and a stretched and wavy edge, or too few and an edge that puckers. Learn more about how to pick stitches up evenly along an edge.	more photos The Pattern: Here's the free downloadable Tryst Cropped Vest pattern.
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